Her son, now her stepson, is named Jacob (Jaden Smith, The Pursuit of Happyness) rather than Bobby, and is given absent-father issues that make him resentful of his stepmother and hostile to the alien, whom he doesn’t know is Klaatu. Here she’s reinvented as an astrobiologist on the government’s short list of who to call in case of alien invasion, who knows exactly who Klaatu is from the beginning. In the original, Helen Benson is a government secretary and a single mom who meets Klaatu incognito and has no idea who he is. A colonel? Shouldn’t there at least be a general or two on the table, or a Department of Defense emergency council, or something? What happened to the Secretary of Defense? Heck, what happened to the President and the VP? I know they’re squirreled away in secure locations, but who exactly put Colonel Mustache in charge of planetary security? (An officious cop who tries to arrest Klaatu also has a mustache: a token of officious authority, perhaps?) The government has assembled the best and brightest, and they’re smart enough to know that no one on the planet has a clue.īut then at some point military policy impacting the security of the planet appears to be in the hands of a mustachioed colonel (Robert Knepper) who is not an important enough character to have a name, but whose yahoo status may be suggested by his southern drawl, and whose arrogant belief that he knows how to handle giant robots from space in Central Park threatens to usher in an apocalypse. Military personnel on the brink of first contact shakily request rules of engagement, and a surgical team looks with nervous bewilderment at a possibly dying extraterrestrial, wondering what interventions they might safely attempt. government scrambles to respond to detection of an extraterrestrial object on a collision course with the earth - and then to the unexpected nature of that object when it touches down in Central Park - is the clear sense that even the world’s leading experts are in over their heads, that no one can confidently formulate the correct procedures in a wholly unprecedented situation. One of the nice touches in the first act, as the U.S. You’re on your own.” What does that even mean? Later Jackson tells Helen, “I make no promises. And there’s Secretary of Defense Regina Jackson (Kathy Bates) saying “We have the situation under control,” when she not only knows perfectly well that they don’t, but has said so, so that Helen Benson (Jennifer Connelly) can reply, “You’re not in control - you don’t know what he’s capable of,” even though Jackson actually does have a pretty good idea what Klaatu is capable of. Then you have a character who protests, “As scientists, we can’t consent to that.” Right, because scientists have never done anything unethical, goodness knows. Derrickson ( The Exorcism of Emily Rose) effectively builds and sustains a sense of thoughtful tension - until the screenplay lets him down. The special effects are well conceived and executed, and the story represents a credible effort to honor the original while contributing something new. The xenobiological and geopolitical implications of the premise have been developed with some care and intelligence. Humans are a virus, and Keanu is the cure? Yes, it’s The Happening all over again, but with an alien plague of nano-locusts instead of unexplained suicides. He means he’s here to save the earth from us. When Klaatu says he’s here to “save the earth,” he doesn’t mean he wants to save human beings from themselves. (He does admire Bach, perhaps for his mathematical elegance.) Keanu–Klaatu isn’t much concerned with the human propensity for suspicion and violence, nor is he the type to be impressed by the lofty aspirations of the Gettysburg Address during a visit to the Lincoln Memorial. However, it turns out that the enlightenment this Klaatu brings is a little less inspiring than that of his 1951 counterpart. It’s the kind of line you might expect of an enlightened being who comes down from the heavens with a message for mankind - particularly one like Klaatu who is known from the original film for such Christ-like acts as dying and coming back to life, and who is played here by Keanu Reeves, no stranger to sci-fi Christ figures.
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