Review: The Day the Earth Stood Still

The 2008 movie The Day the Earth Stood Still is not a good movie, for me. I have never watched and neither will watch the older film for the very apparent reason that it is already outdated. Sci-fis probably have the shortest life span among all the movies, in that the rapid development in science will soon catch up with people’s imagination. Then new ideas and thoughts will have to be made up again. So I have doubted the possibility of adapting a sci-fi more than 2 decades ago and still make it relevant.

There are two reasons why this wouldn’t work.

For one, nothing can be reasonable or beautiful without a central idea. A movie should have integrity, which means a clear and committed central idea. This idea sets every detail. Then, it will be the problem that whether these are reasonable and will live within time. There is a major transmission in the theme of the movie—from nuclear to environment. The previous structure and details are all set to serve the nuclear thing, while this time they use the same structure to serve another idea. I could understand how much thoughts they should have paid to resolve the conflicts in the process of adapting. I bet it will not easier than to create a new story.

For another thing, science is developing really fast, many things in the film maybe mysterious back then but seem obviously naive, unreasonable and impossible nowadays ( the huge iron man coming out of a luminous mass ) they don’t even try to give a reasonable explanation to that. The film is set in 1928, back when the science may not be so advanced, but possibilities are now seen by the audience of today. There is an insoluble paradox here...