Review of The Day the Earth Stood Still (2008) by Mark W — 14 Feb 2011

Although I have never seen the original, it takes little imagination to believe that it's the better and spookier film. The main idea is pretty interesting after all. Here it leads to nothing more than a couple of decent disaster scenes and a lot of talking about humanity's guilt with rather uninteresting characters, which is a shame considering the really decent cast.

To get Keanu Reeves to play the emotionless alien is a bit too much of the obvious choice, considering his lack of mimic. Like so often in such films, the kid (Jaden Smith) is extremely irritating at times.

The only reason they included him was to have a supposedly touching cemetery scene, which probably only works if you consider him super cute and don't wanna see him cry. While the film is not even boring it just seems to lead nowhere.

The solution is pretty predictable and doesn't make all that much sense. That's wasting a lot of potential, in a nutshell.