Review of The Day The Earth Stood Still
Comments: plaidder@mindspring.com
I guess it shouldn't have surprised me that The Day The Earth Stood Still was a slow mover, but I still found it disappointing. This is a film that has not transcended the period in which it was created, which is most definitely the 1950s. How can you tell? Well, aside from the outfits and the cars, the threat of nuclear annihilation hanging over this movie like a giant suffocating black cloud is a pretty good tipoff--that and the way this film combines paranoia and didacticism in a plot that is both laughably cheesy and ominously disturbing. If it works at all now, it's as a window into that time in American history, with its shiny cotton-candy outside wrapped around the disavowed terror and pain at the center.
The plot is very simple--so simple, really, that it has a hard time sustaining a full-length film. An alien spaceship lands on the Mall in Washington, DC, and Klaatu (Michael Rennie) steps out of it. He is of course immediately shot and wounded by one of the jittery soldiers who have surrounded his craft, which gets the visit off to an unpromising start. From there it gets worse as Klaatu attempts to assemble representatives of all nations on Earth so that he can deliver his message from the beyond to them. After determining that the President's lackeys are useless, he escapes from government custody, takes a room at a boarding house, and befriends the widowed Patricia Neal and her charming young son, who is prone to saying things like "Gee whiz." Pestered by the police and the army, Klaatu is eventually finally able to get a group of scientists from all nations of hte Earth assembled on the mall to receive his message, which he delivers. Klaatu then gets back into the ship and takes off, leaving Patricia Neal looking sorrowfully up after his departing saucer.
The film takes its basic point--that humans are such a paranoid, aggressive, selfish bunch that it's really a wonder we haven't rubbed ourselves out centuries ago--and whacks at it with a sledgehammer until by the end it's splattered in an ugly mess all over the screen. The filmmakers' sense of irony is only slightly more nuanced than Alannis Morissette's--there are a number of shots of the folks at the boarding house eating meals along with the tall, handsome, well-mannered and nattily dressed Klaatu (who, conveniently, looks exactly like a human) while the radio blares out warnings about the rapacious alien beast lurking about in the shadows. Little Jimmy takes Klaatu on a tour of DC's landmarks which allows Klaatu to cluck disapprovingly over Arlington Cemetery, admire the words engraved on the Lincoln Memorial, and tell little Jimmy all about how on his planet they don't have wars or poverty, etc. etc. etc. From Day 1 Klaatu is misunderstood and mistreated by everyone but the innocent Jimmy, doe-eyed Patricia Neal, and Professor Barnard, a "scientist" identified by Jimmy as "the smartest man in the world." (Barnard is, naturally, not only male but a theoretical physicist with a hairdo that wants to be Einstein.)
What's interesting about *The Day the Earth Stood Still,* more than its way-obvious "message," is the way the film ends up endorsing the values it tries to take on--more proof that you can't get outside of ideology. For instance, Klaatu says "We come in peace," and the film obviously wants us to believe this--that Klaatu is the good guy and we are the atavistic savages who don't know our own good when we see it. However, his final message says, essentially, "Nuclear capability has made you a danger to the rest of us, so unless you evolve fast we're going to just take your planet out. So straighten out and fly right or say goodbye to all this and hello to oblivion." To me, this is not coming in peace. The only utopia the writers seem to have been able to imagine is one in which order is kept by a race of superpowerful robots who are programmed to immediately liquidate any individual, culture, or planet that engages in any act of aggression. Somehow this creates paradise, instead of a system of galaxywide oppression against which no revolt will ever be possible. The nuclear mindset remains intact; the only way to end the threat of nuclear annihilation is to bring in the threat of an even more terrible annihilation. Deterrence, Death Star Style.
It's also interesting to see those little period touches. For instance, in a scene in whcih a group of Army doctors is marveling at Klaatu's amazing powers of recuperation, *all three* of them are smoking merrily away. And instead of being amazed at, for instance, the sophistication of Klaatu's computer system, what seems to impress everyone on Earth is the fact that Klaatu's people have developed some kind of metal that is completely impervious to everything. This is a big deal in *Forbidden Planet* too, and it shows you where peoples' minds were: on building a stronger bomber. And when Klaatu decides to demonstrate his peoples' superior technological might, he does it by shutting off electric power all over the world for half an hour--something that appears to scare the shit out of people. I suppose we'd still find it unsettling, but it also speaks to how nervous people still were about electricity, which was really only a few decades old as a technology. For us, it's the Millennium bug; for them, it was a blackout.
In terms of SFX, the film isn't particularly exciting; the spaceship looks pretty good for a flying saucer, and GORT, the superpowerful robot, is very creepy and menacing; but Michael Rennie is a human in a funny suit, and the film doesn't really pretend otherwise. This is a film that shows you nothing about life on other planets, it being completely obsessed with life on this one. But then, that's sort of the story of a lot of sci-fi, isn't it.
C ya,
The Plaid Adder