The Day the Earth Stood Still
Feeling like television isn’t inherently a bad thing, but it is not what I expected from a film of this regard. I think Star Trek: Insurrection works perfectly well if you consider it as a higher budget, double length Star Trek The Next Generation episode, but I wouldn’t be rushing to put it on any top science fiction lists… I won’t even put it on any top Star Trek lists.
I think where The Day the Earth Stood Still runs into trouble is that it has grandiose aspirations with low budget production values. Sure, the story is not a sweeping space opera a la Star Wars, keeping the story largely on Earth and concerned with Earthly concerns, but it deals with alien visitors and world wide political realities that feel big and important. Despite that, the actual flow of the film feels very small and like it was made on a shoe-string budget. Its story deals mostly in a series of conversations, between the visitor and the various people from the government and the local community in the immediate vicinity of their landing site. This isn’t the whole story, though. Movies can be small and simple and still feel like cinema. A slice of life film like Spanglish isn’t about anything more than a family unit’s relationships with each other and with others, but that choice of composition, lens, blocking, editing, etc. create an emotional intensity and visual engagement we associate with the cinema. The Day the Earth Stood Still, with a few exceptions, lacks that cinematic je ne c’est quoi. In essence, this is a difficult to explain or quantify aesthetic concern but one that I still think is both valid and relevant. It doesn’t look like a movie because it doesn’t feel like it was shot like a movie.
Beyond this vague aesthetic issue, the main quibble I have with the movie is to do with suspension of disbelief. The movie is trying to make a point about fear in early Cold War America, so some of this may be in service of the moral point at the cost of some poorer world building, but it bothered me how the military is presented as so mindlessly aggressive. Even after their total powerlessness against the visitor’s technologies has been incontrovertibly demonstrated upon his arrival, the military still reaches for a gun in every situation. “When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail,” as they say, but even military people have the common sense to see a laser-eyed, bullet impervious robot melting tanks and not think the solution is just sending more tanks.
There is probably an equally effective story about Cold War fears with all the same tensions and themes around the people’s sudden feeling of powerlessness in the face of this supreme force, and in the military conniving to find a weakness they can exploit to neutralize the perceived threat, rather than bothering to try and understand the visitor’s purpose in being there and if that purpose makes them a genuine threat, but instead the command structure is illogical in just the right way to serve the plot and, perhaps more importantly, the visuals.
As a fault, this is easily overlooked or ignored, but for me, I found it hurt my suspension of disbelief just that little bit necessary to be mildly irritating, like that little bit of sand that gets in your shoe at the beach and, while it doesn’t hurt to walk, it does make your gate funny. For a story that is, I think, trying to say something real about humanity, it would land a lot harder if the portrayal of humanity was presented in the most real way.
Overall, despite the above complaints, I liked the movie. It comes from the school of mid-century science fiction that is action and drama light, but intellectually and philosophically heavy and while I don’t think those have to be totally separate, strictly speaking, as a sort of exploration of the military, government, and every day citizens relationships with fear of the unknown, it does an admirable job. Its utopian vision for pax terra is a little bit in the same school as Lost Horizon, to wit a lot of hand waving about the practical realities of the utopia so as to not have to ever explain them, but if you concern yourself less with the final monologue and more with the way the film proposes our small minded, self destructive instincts stand between ourselves and any hope of a future utopia, it works very well. It just packages that thoughtful thesis in a rather plain, un-cinematic wrapper.
Would Recommend: If you love the kind of contemplative, often speculative, science fiction best captured by Rod Serling’s original run of the Twilight Zone.
Would Not Recommend: If your science fiction tastes trend towards deep space dog fighting and deadly laser pistols.