Keanu Barada Nikto

Jennifer Connelly and Keanu Reeves in The Day The Earth Stood Still

Science fiction fans ground their teeth to stumps in anguishing gnashing last year when they heard the news. It was outrage enough that Hollywood was planning to remake The Day the Earth Stood Still, one of the most highly regarded of all 1950s sci-fi movies. The real poison arrow was the announcement that the central role of Klaatu, the alien who comes to Earth to warn mankind away from their destruction, played with British reserve and dignity in 1951 by Michael Rennie, would be taken by Keanu Reeves.

As a Turner Classic Movies addict who generally feels that old black-and-white classics are prima facie always better than slick new remakes, I am here to tell you that the new The Day the Earth Stood Still is way better than the original. Honest to Gort!

I should probably admit that I’ve never been a big fan of the original, one of those movies whose admirers are, I suspect, primarily people who first saw it before their 10th birthdays. Blandly directed by the stodgy Robert Wise, it has no more visual or dramatic interest than you would expect in a half-hour Twilight Zone episode. It’s admonition that earthlings had better learn to live together instead of lobbing atomic weapons at each other may be unarguable, but seen outside the early Cold War context of the time, it’s not terribly stirring.

The new version, predictably, spends a good amount of effort dazzling us with state-of-the-art special effects. Are these necessary to tell the story? Probably not. But they sure do make it a lot more interesting to look at. The script works to make plausible things that we had to take on faith in the 1950s, like why Klaatu would have a human form. He adopts it with borrowed DNA when he comes to earth.

In this respect, Day recalls a more recent sci-fi classic, John Carpenter’s Starman, in which Jeff Bridges was an alien who took the form of a dead man in order to communicate with his widow. There’s even a similarity between that film’s Karen Allen and Jennifer Connolly, who co-stars here as a medical researcher who becomes Klaatu’s one human ally. It’s a shame that they didn’t borrow a little more while they were at it, because Reeves’s performance could have used some of the physical comedy that Bridges brought to his alien.

The objections of sci-fi nerds aside, it made sense to cast Reeves in the role of an alien, stiff in an unfamiliar body, who represses any emotions he may have in order to carry out his mission. What doesn’t make so much sense is why Reeves took a part that is only going to reinforce his reputation as a wooden actor. He doesn’t make us feel one way or the other about the character (not that he gets any help in that aspect from the script).

Director Scott Derrickson and screenwriter David Scarpa hit enough touchstones to make the film work as an homage to the original, with an occasional dollop of wit. The giant robot Gort gets his name not from Klaatu but as a military acronym. Mostly, though, this Day is more different than it is similar. Connolly’s character is a member of a team assembled by the government to deal with the alien arrival, and much of the film take place from their point of view. Klaatu has come not to warn us off from the aggressive use of nuclear weapons but to save the planet from mankind. (Why he would need to do so is never really explained—the film just assumes that we would agree that wiping out humanity could only benefit Earth.) The worldwide panic that ensues is much better depicted than in the cheesy montages of 1951 (my favorite moment there was a bunch of extras in berets gathered around a checkerboarded café table representing France), giving this film a palpable tension.

There’s a lot more to enjoy in the details than I have room to write about. Not many filmmakers searching for an actor to lend a note of gravitas would have cast John Cleese, who has a scene as a scientist with a Nobel Prize in the field of, if I heard correctly, biological altruism. Allusions to the stories of Noah and the ark and the plagues of Egypt add some punch to those raised on the Bible. And some of it benefits from things in the zeitgeist that the filmmakers couldn’t have known when they were making this: a shot of a stilled auto assembly line, or the general mood of cautious optimism for the Obama presidency.

Enjoyable as it is for the most part—the 104 minutes race by with no dull spots—Day sags at the ending. This isn’t much of a surprise: You can guess how it’s going to end, with a banal plea for the value of mankind. And the way the ending leaves you hanging is inexplicable. Still, it’s much better than the recent remakes of The War of the Worlds and I Am Legend.