Posted on 12/12/2008 10:00:44 AM PST by steve-b
If you're looking for chuckles this holiday season, bypass the miserably unfunny "Four Christmases" and go where the real comedy is -- "The Day the Earth Stood Still," a clumsy, moronic remake of Robert Wise's brilliant 1951 classic about an alien invader trying to save the human race from its own self-destructive impulses.
What did poor Wise do, incidentally, to deserve such treatment? His chilling horror masterpiece "The Haunting" was already put through the meat-grinder with an effects-heavy 1999 remake, and his thriller "The Andromeda Strain" was revisited with ill results in a SciFi Channel re-do earlier this year. What next -- a hip-hop reinterpretation of "The Sound of Music"? (Granted, Queen Latifah could totally tear up "Climb Ev'ry Mountain," but still…)
The new "Day" can't be bothered to include the thought-provoking dialogue of the original, choosing instead to bury the audience with special effects that are visually impressive but no substitute for an actual script. And what words do remain are so exquisitely awful that they provide some of the season's biggest laughs....
(Excerpt) Read more at msnbc.msn.com ...
Watch it again
Theme of original movie - Fight all you want amongst yourselves. But now that you have atomic weapons AND space travel you pose a threat to others.
Behave yourselves, you primitive screwheads, or we'll sic our monster robot on you.
So it will join “The Day After Tomorrow” and “Inconvenient Truth” in the halls of really bad fiction about global warming.
AlGORT! A muslim GORT! LOL!
Klaatu B-rated No-No
I preferred the original version "The Last Man on Earth", 1964, starring Vincent Price; which was much closer to the orignal novella by Robert Bloch.
Ditto. Sounded like a poorly camouflaged call for the UN to police the world, after everyone - everyone - was disarmed.
Directed by Robert Wise. It was "his" film.
You're right. The producer of the film, Julian Blaustein thought that the US should surrender some of its sovereignty to the UN. He felt the US was being grossly unfair to the Soviet Union (Stalin was still in charge in 1951).
I'm not making this up. If you have the DVD, watch the extras.
Funny, I see the original story growing by accretion with each retelling.
I thought the novella excelled only in its plot, with the Vincent Price movie equally disappointing.
The latest version finally lived up to the quality of the original idea.
In this remake does anyone sell any of those perfect diamonds and make a fortune? That’d be a great story in itself.
Worse than that, Jen’s rockin’ boobs seemed to vanish.
Huh? In the original movie, he identified himself as “Klaatu” — after he was shot and killed, but got better, he gave the name “Carpenter” when he was in the guise of just one of the local humans. (Symbolism? What symbolism?)
This is a classic line. LOL!
You’re right Klaatu did identify himself in the first movie. Some say that the “Carpenter” name and his mission to warn and possibly save humans followed by his death at the hands of humans and his coming back to life is a Hollywood suggestion of the Passion.
Kathy Bates, as SECDEF, with her 1940s hairdo.
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