Metacinema

I thought I’d follow up the movie review of mine that Bryan so graciously posted below with an article comparing the new The Day the Earth Stood Still with its closest philosophical predecessor. The catch is that the film I’m referring to isn’t the original version of The Day the Earth Stood Still, but the 1996 Charlie Sheen sci-fi conspiracy movie The Arrival.

Despite being billed as a contemporary re-imagining of the original 1951 classic, the new The Day the Earth Stood Still runs the classic story through a wholesale thematic and contextual shift, substituting ecological polemics for Cold War tension. About the only plot element retained by the remake is that of an alien-instigated doomsday scenario partly brought on by humanity’s collective failings…which is something that it also has in common with The Arrival.

Released in 1996, The Arrival follows a former radio astronomer as he attempts to expose an alien conspiracy determined to re-terraform the earth for their own needs through accelerated global warming. The aliens glibly rationalize their actions by claiming that mankind would’ve killed themselves off eventually anyway. The way the aliens see it, they’re just getting it over with faster.

On the surface, The Day the Earth Stood Still (2008) seems to feature aliens with a nobler cause than those depicted in The Arrival. However, even a cursory examination of the film’s subtext shows that their goals are essentially identical. Rather than reducing the earth to a cinder like in the ’50s version, Keanu Reeve’s Klaatu threatens to wipe out humanity in order to “save the earth from us”. His true intentions are unmasked when he justifies this drastic course of action by noting that only a handful of planets are capable of supporting intelligent life, and they can’t risk losing the earth for the sake of a single species.

Now, as self-contradictory as that rationale is, it basically tips Klaatu’s hand, revealing that other intelligent species plan on colonizing the earth after humanity is gone. This motive fundamentally changes the entire nature of Klaatu and Gort’s (sorry, G.O.R.T.’s) visit from a peacekeeping mission to an invasion justified by the human race’s lousy record as stewards of the earth–the exact same excuse that the aliens in The Arrival used.