Review of The Day the Earth Stood Still (2008) by Geoff T — 04 Feb 2012

Overly disappointed I would say best sums up how I feel after watching this movie. If we take anything from this movie it is that we are not perfect, and in the past few centuries we have destroyed much of the world we call home. Where the heck to begin?

I suppose we will go Ugly-Bad-Good.

Ugly:

The story is just faulty. I mean you have this cast of actors who when put together "should" be able to knock a movie out of the park and yet we seem to fall flat on our faces. We have characters that have no emotion, characters with unnecessary emotion, characters without reason and just ignoramus characters. This movie had so much potential and it was wasted on the CGI, which by the way needed some help. If you are going to drop a ton of money into a movie's production, do it WELL! So the story hurt, the characters hurt and the CGI was.. *sigh*.

Bad:

Did you know that you have Keanu Reeves as your main actor? Ooh I thought that may have just slipped by. The man can freaking act and yet he is limited to one liners and acts of a divine being. I mean c'mon man.. He is here to supposedly end the human race in order to preserve all other life on Earth and yet we struggle with getting two or more sentences out of him. The frustration while I was watching this movie due to the lack of good credible acting was enormous. LET THE FREAKING ACTORS ACT!

Good:

The action was just that--freaking kick butt action. I had so much fun when people were fighting or when the silly humans thought they could destroy something they have no clear understanding of. And I suppose this is where I will go into my biggest portion of liking the movie:

!Themes! ~~ SPOILER ALERT ~~.

If we take anything from this movie it is that we are not perfect, and in the past few centuries we have destroyed much of the world we call home. We are on a collision course with Death and Destruction if we do not change our ways. The irony is that it took a movie, a cheesy Sci-Fi movie to bring something like this up to a relatively "main-stage." These powerful themes are what really saved this movie from dropping closer to 2 stars or even 1 was the huge driving force behind it. It's something to think about when you watch this movie and then I challenge you to apply it to your life and to those around you.

That's the mark of a good movie; but sadly this one took too many wrong turns to be saved and stored forever as a classic.

~~END SPOILER~~.

So in a nutshell what's up?

The movie is long, drawn out in some spots, confusing in many and fun. There is action mixed with terrible use of actors and huge driving themes saving the movie from collapse. I bought the movie, and when people ask me about it I say watch it. You can learn a lot from the bad steps of a movie and in this case hopefully those who have seen it can say they have learned that maybe we are headed down one too many bad paths.. and just maybe we can turn off before we will fail.

3 stars out of 5.