The Day the Earth Stood Still (2008 remake)

[dalekboy]

While I don't see the point of most remakes, there are some that I think are better than the originals, like Ocean's Eleven and Little Shop of Horrors, or different but more or less equal to the originals, like The Thing and Cat People.

The local video library has brought back $2 Tuesday, so I thought it was time to check out the remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still.

It's a pointless remake that will be deservedly forgotten within a couple of years, along with the remakes of The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds. It was okay to bearable for the first half, but quickly dissolved into a painful and obvious piece of rubbish by the second. I don't mind the green message, that was an appropriate updating, making the film as relevant to now as the original was to its time. No, it's the characters who are so badly written and by the numbers that they hurt the film. Well that and the need for massive spectacle where subtlety would be far more effective.

Oh, and Gort is crap. They missed the point of what made the original scary. They made their Gort a little bit too humanoid and not quite robotic enough, but mostly I found the lack of the slow reveal of Gort's laser eye meant there was no tension. In the original Gort was impressive enough, but it was when his visor slowly moved aside and one saw the glow beneath, you knew it was bad and had time to wonder how bad it would be.

Oh, and there's lots of CG where there really doesn't need to be. And it's really obvious. What, can't Hollywood afford to hire real helicopters anymore?

This film is exactly why I don't go see major films at the cinema unless I get glowing reports from people. It wasn't worth my time or my money. In fact I originally thought that $2 would be a fair price to see this, but now having seen it, it wasn't even that good.

Don't bother. Hire or buy the original. Yes it's got its flaws, but it was written by people who knew how to write, and made by people who knew how to make films.