If you haven’t seen the craptacular new remake of “The Day The Earth Stood Still”, congratulations! You’re smarter than me. Hoping for a spectacular big-budget robots-and-aliens movie, I subjected myself to it not long ago, and boy do I regret it.
Let’s see. What does this movie contain?
- Keanu Reeves’ horrific acting? Check
- A fucking annoying token black kid a la Little Miss Fucking Gymnastics in Jurrasic Park 2? Check! Note to producers: I would pay good money to see this little shit burnt alive. Contact me.
- Manhattan in danger? Check! Wow, what a new and innovative plot device. Imagine .. a movie about some kind of disaster in New York? Who could conceive of such a thing!
- A lame-ass tacked-on environmental theme? Check!
- Keanu Reeves speaking stilted Chinese? Oh yes.
- Reverent fascination with the US Government, US Army, and US Office of the President? Check.
- A lot of “staring in awe” scenes, ie. characters getting out of their stopped cars and staring around them in wonder, or a woman, child in hand, slowly walking towards, and gazing awestruck at, foreign objects? Check and boy it’ll make you puke.
- Ridiculously blatant product placement, including a stupid Microsoft “table” computer complete with Vista logo and spurious animations and sounds? Check
- Attempts at “moving” scenes which are laughably un-moving but also so annoying that you can’t laugh and instead want to just club the characters to death with a baseball bat? Check.
Actually, I think I’m onto something with that last point. There are very few scenes in this movie which would not be infinitely improved by someone walking on mid-scene and beating one or all of the characters to death, or even just shooting them. Especially that god damn kid with dreadlocks who is nothing but trouble and deserves to be pushed off a bridge, but pretty much everyone in it really. If I was an omnipotent alien, and I saw this movie, I’d want to get rid of humanity too just for the sheer veangeful pleasure of it.
Rating: 1/5
PS At no point does the earth stand still.
Tags: movies
February 20th, 2009 at 5:32 pm
I can’t believe you bothered. Go and find “The Square”, it’s an excellent (recent) Australian film which did poorly due to bad advertising and the fact that Australian cinema has been bad just a few times too often over the last few years.
February 20th, 2009 at 7:01 pm
Wish I hadn’t.
Thanks for the recommendation. Yes, AU film has been bad “just a few” too many times all right, but there have been some good ones. Mad Max remains one of my favourite movies!
February 21st, 2009 at 7:56 pm
i really enjoyed your baseball bat plot improvement. made my day.
February 23rd, 2009 at 10:16 am
I too made the mistake of watching this steaming pile of crap, not because I thought it would be particularly good, I was just looking for a “cinema movie” to go and see. The kind with lots of special effects that look all impressive on a big screen and stuff. Big mistake in this instance.
I think the only thing that would have redeemed it in my eyes would have been if the earth had been destroyed at the end, and everyone on earth died, I would have stood up in the cinema and appluaded.