The Day the Earth Stood Still (2008)

2008 • 103 minutes

About this movie

In The Day the Earth Stood Still, a contemporary reinvention of the 1951 science fiction classic, renowned scientist Dr. Helen Benson (Jennifer Connelly) finds herself face to face with an alien called Klaatu (Keanu Reeves), who travels across the universe to warn of an impending global crisis.

Ratings and reviews

Watched this twice I believe. The message on this movie is great and makes you think a lot but the movie itself is quite poor. You kind of know what you'll get and Keanu plays it well. The bit where they speak chinese and then decide to speak english the 2 of them suddenly is just bad as they will continue to talk the same thing. The start of the movie is quite underdeveloped and the scene with the doctors is laughable as they expect treatment to work. I'd say 3 stars is a very fair rating.

Very busy director Scott Derrickson somehow found a space between projects to pay loving, respectful homage to Robert Wise's original TDTESS. The characters of Klaatu (Keanu Reeves) and his faithful automaton GORT have been successfully udated, bringing an almost unfeeling, cold logic to proceedings. The visual effects are startling, the actors are excellent and the logical scripting still retains a warm thread of humanity as Keanu Reeves' extraterrestrial visitor sees the best of humanity.

I saw this in the cinema, I can't remember why, anyhow this film remake has some good parts but it doesn't quite have the powerful emotional message of the original classic. Also I prefer the original actor who plays the alien! Mr Reeves just can't bring it!