The Day the Earth Stood Still: A Very Belated Review
by lyndsie ~ January 28th, 2009. Filed under: Family Entertainment.
Now … okay. I saw the remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still fairly soon after it first came out. As I was watching it, I was thinking to myself, “Well … okay, I guess this isn’t so bad.” Walking out of the theatre with my fiance and her parents (we were all bonding — three girls and one guy at this movie … ha ha ha!), my opinion changed. I told my girlfriend, I says, “It wasn’t that bad. I just … wouldn’t ever want to watch it again.” However, I haven’t been able to get this flick off my mind since then — and no, not because it was good.
In retrospect? This was an awful, awful movie. The only thing really admirable about it was that Keanu Reeves finally found the perfect part — besides Neo, of course, which has been the only movie in which I can stand seeing him. He plays an alien who apparently has not learned the art of adding inflection to his voice. At all.
Otherwise: Will Smith’s little spawn got on my nerves so bad it made me wish the big metal man would have stepped on him. Worse yet, this movie is guilty of the same sin made by countless remakes. It lost the entire value of the original. What was a rich metaphor about the futility of war and the damage which can be caused by intolerance turned into a flashy, FX packed trainwreck. The only morality messages you can take away from this movie are that littering is bad, mmkay, and nepotism is even worse in Hollywood than it is anywhere else.
