Monday
15Sep2008
Seven Minutes from 'The Day The Earth Stood Still'
Monday, September 15, 2008 at 11:03AM
If you watch the new J.J. Abrams show Fringe on Fox, you got something of a surprise
during last night's encore rebroadcast: Seven minutes from
The Day the Earth Stood Still, starring
Keanu Reeves
and Jennifer
Connelly.
Reader Comments (5)
December 12th has been marked on my calendar as the Day the Earth Stood Still. See you there.
Looking good to me.
Ahh they took the preview down...
The enduring strength and popularity of the 1951 "The Day the Earth Stood Still" resides in its quiet simplicity and intelligence, very much as Robert Wise employed in "The Curse of the Cat People," where less was more. In the new version, even triple helpings of more is still not enough. Satisfying today's cyberspace and videogame addicts requires blood, guts, and massive destruction to drive a point home, and then driving a stake through the audience's heart to boot. Acting styles have changed? Gimme a break. You mean writing and narrative styles have changed, concurrent with the lowering of the average intelligence. When Fox made the original Darryl Zanuck specifically greenlighted the project providing that it DID NOT use out of space and huge special effects, which would have been done then, and very well at Fox, minus computers, but Wise decided to go the "narrative" way, instead of today's mandatory "Let's destroy New York and Washington with 9 zillion robots and 20 zillion CGI effects, so the audience will get the point and be able to relate to the story." The first major casualty of the remake is the central character of Klaatu, as an older and very wise visitor from another planet, into a much younger mad dog killer, The very dark photography is also a steal from "The Dark Knight," wherein it's a job just to see the movie. The Robert Wise original used the then new technique in which every scene, night time or day time, could actually be seen. But today's audiences, believing that the movies began with the computer, acept being in the dark as perfectly normal.
Nobody's saying the original is bad, just that audiences, removed from it by over half a century, are less likely to get into it now. I would argue against the notion that narrative styles have become more simplistic and that there aren't good screenplays today, even in science fiction, which seems to be a point you're trying to make. For example, the screenplay and visuals for 2001, which is itself 40 years old, far surpass The Day the Earth Stood Still. Of course, 2001 is also in a way standing on the shoulders of the Wise movie, because it couldn't be achieved without its predecessors. Same thing for Star Wars, which couldn't exist without 2001. And yes, acting styles for film have changed dramatically in since 1951, as has nearly every other facet of filmmaking. You wouldn't see a Daniel Plainview performance in 1951, nor Charlize Theron in Monster.
There's just no going back, unfortunately. Movies are made a certain way now, and they look a certain way now, and you can't ask someone who was born after Star Wars to watch a movie made 25 years earlier and work backwards to get to the point where Day the Earth Stood Still was a technological achievement. To those fans, it's just a cheesy sci-fi movie from forever ago.
Do you ever see old footage of Babe Ruth playing baseball and find yourself saying, "Wow, he'd never make it today. He's too fat, too slow, and the pitchers are so much better." Hell, catchers stood up behind the plate back then. It's kind of the same thing. You can't ask too many movies from that long ago to stand up against contemporary movies; the expectations of the audience are different and the way movies are made is much more advanced than it used to be. I think that's especially true with science fiction, which, by definition, invites the addition of technology to the movie. A western or a film noir doesn't necessarily have that obstacle, because there aren't Martians and lasers to contend with.