The Day the Earth Stood Still
"Gort, Klaatu barada nikto."
That dialogue, from 1951's "The Day the Earth Stood Still," has served generations of movie fans as a secret handshake, an in-joke nod to one of the greatest of '50s alien-invasion movies. In the new remake of the same title, Keanu Reeves delivers the line - I think - buried under pounds of goopy exo-skeleton and with his voice digitally altered. Something has been lost in the translation, and it's not just the script.
But how do you breathe life into this property after everything from "Close Encounters" to "Independence Day" has had its way with it? More crucially, why? Directed by Scott Derrickson ("The Exorcism of Emily Rose"), the new "Day" gets off to a solid start, with a huge alien spacecraft landing on the Eastern seaboard. The location is now New York's Central Park and the UFO is a glowing sphere, but the humanoid Klaatu (Reeves) and his ginormous metal robot, Gort, still stride forth to warn humanity that its days are numbered.
Back in the 1950s the peril was nuclear Armageddon; these days it's the environment. So "The Day the Earth Stood Still" shares with "WALL-E," "The Happening," and other recent pop jeremiads the certainty that the planet has met the enemy and it is us. "If the earth dies, you die," Klaatu intones. "If you die, the earth survives." One question: For a movie so worried about junk, why is
Chased by the paranoid minions of the US Secretary of Defense (Kathy Bates with unfortunate hair), Klaatu hits the highway with a mournful astro-biologist (Jennifer Connelly) and her fatherless stepson (Jaden Smith, Will's kid), who initially thinks the only good ET is a dead one. They briefly stay over with an Important Scientist, played by John Cleese in what amounts to the criminal waste of a major Monty Python alumnus, and Klaatu has to decide whether to unleash a swarm of voracious metallic locusts to scrub the earth back down to ground zero.
Those nano-bugs are pretty neat, but they can't save "The Day the Earth Stood Still" from heading south in a hurry. Reeves plays Klaatu with one unchanging facial expression - that's in his range, admittedly, but even Jeff Bridges had more to work with in "Starman" - and the film makes the grave mistake of neglecting Gort, squirreling the cyborg behemoth away in an underground bunker for much of the running time. When a remake wastes the big robot, you know you're in trouble.
There are explosions and flipping cars, but the 1951 original still did far more emotionally with less digitally. Above all, the new "Day the Earth Stood Still" lacks the courage of its own eco-pessimism, and the final scenes play like a rushed, embarrassed concession to our need for happy endings, no matter how far-fetched.
According to a press release, Twentieth Century Fox and the privately held Deep Space Communications Network will start beaming "The Day the Earth Stood Still" beyond our solar system today. Man, are we asking for it.
Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com. For more on movies, go to boston.com/movienation.
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