Film review: The Day the Earth Stood Still

It's rubbish, and the shame is that The Day the Earth Stood Still actually starts off kind of promising.

The production values are there - this film has all the gloss and bang-bangs that only a nine-figure budget can provide.

The casting is also okay - Jennifer Connelly has been breathing life into clunky scripts for half her career, and Keanu Reeves has got the whole bemused-alien schtick down pat.

But this remake of the much-beloved 1951 original has a dirty great hole where its heart, its humour - its whole reason for being - should have been.

In the original, an alien comes to Earth, accompanied by a whacking great robot, to warn us of the terrible dangers of atomic power, and to give us the choice between annihilation and a non-nuclear future.

In 2008, that alien is more concerned about our ecology, but doesn't even pose the question.

Reeves is whisked away by the American Secretary of Defence (Kathy Bates, playing it like Dick Cheney's evil big sister) and forced to go on the lam as a wanted criminal with only Connolly's well-meaning biologist to help him.

And then - well, nothing. After 45 minutes of set-up, the film has completely run out of ideas, and we spend the next hour meandering through a preposterous series of poorly executed set-pieces.

Buildings are destroyed, Connolly is reconciled with her step- son, John Cleese pops in with an unintentionally hilarious cameo, Reeves mouths a load of pseudo-profound twaddle, and the film putters to its foregone conclusion.

The Day the Earth Stood Still is film-making of my least favourite kind - technically competent, but cynical, soulless and written and executed without a skerrick of commitment or artistry.

Like Reeves' alien, this film is only a simulacrum of a living thing.

It has been put together by marketing men and accountants, directed by a hack who can be relied on never to have anything as dangerous or expensive as an original idea, and shovelled into the multiplex to make a few quick dollars out of an audience so benumbed by end-of-the-year ennui that they might not notice that, behind all the noise and motion, there is actually nothing happening up there on the screen.

Just say no.

The Day the Earth Stood Still
Director: Scott Derrickson
Starring: Keanu Reeves, Jennifer Connelly 
Rated: M
Time: 104 minutes
Trailer: Flicks.co.nz

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