Review of The Day the Earth Stood Still (2008) by Tero H — 17 Oct 2012

The start of the movie was interesting and caught my interest, but then the it slowed down and got down to wandering around in a car with a kid. The end of the film got more interesting also, but the film wasn't as great as I had expected. The effects are great and the plot is fine, but the movie doesn't flow onwards, and mankind seems to evolve faster than the story. Keanu Reeves did well, even though he keeps the same face during the whole film. Yet somehow, the film lacks something. The plot isn't diverse or deep enough. Lots of questions are left unanswered: where did the aliens come from, what was their agenda in more detail, what their relationship to mankind in general, who were they to decide the fate of earth, and so on.

There are a few interesting thoughts the film invokes, however. One comes up when Klaatu says that Earth is one of the handful of planets in the entire known universe capable of supporting life. Indeed, what if Earth really is the only, or one of the handful of planets where any kind of life is possible? Does that not make Earth, nature and its preservation even more important to mankind? It wasn't a flop but it did let its viewer down by showing some promise of something quite cool which didn't really come about in the end. Among the alien-human-contact scifi movies, this is unfortunately not the best of its kind. Not bad scifi, but it could have been much better had the story only progressed faster and had more turns and change.