Day 32: Klaatu Barada Nikto

THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL (1951)

Directed by Robert Wise

Starring: Michael Rennie, Patricia Neal, Hugh Marlowe, Billy Gray, Sam Jaffe

The world waits with baited breath as a flying saucer lands in Washington D.C.  As its inhabitants emerge, we greet the space man in the traditional American fashion – we shoot him.  But don’t freak out, we just winged him!  He’ll be okay.  Remember, gun control is hitting what you aim at.

This svelte young space cadet is named Klaatu (Rennie), and he comes to earth to bring a message to all of earth’s nations.  However, he picked a bad time – the height of the Cold War.  He is kept under strict guard at a local hospital, but manages to escape and live among the ignorant earth slobs at a boarding house (under the name Mr. Carpenter), where he meets a young single mother named Helen (Neal) and her son Bobby (Gray).  While there, he sees the paranoia of the public in full swing, even though he develops a bond with Helen and Bobby.  But Helen’s jealous boyfriend (Marlowe) thinks there’s more to Mr. Carpenter than meets the eye. 

I had a really hard time sitting through this thoroughly boring and preachy film.  While many of you will take that to mean that I disagree with the film’s message – i.e., nuclear war is a bad thing – I actually don’t.  It’s a pretty screwed up world we live in, even today, and the fewer nutjobs with nuclear bombs we have traipsing around the world, the better.  But the film is used as a pulpit and the script as a sermon, which makes for a pretty bland movie.  Why not show us the effects of nuclear war?  Or have the aliens target our own nuclear enrichment facilities?  Or do something other than stand there and gloat about how superior your society is compared to ours? 

Also, the whole morality of the film is a bit flawed.  Klaatu’s ultimatum is this: live at peace with us, or we’ll wipe out your entire planet.  It’s not “We will defend ourselves,” or “We have the right to exist the same as you.”  No, it’s, “set one foot in our atmosphere and we’ll burn your planet to a crisp.”  Isn’t the same kind of thinking the film accuses us of having?  Thus, the moral of the film is, when confronted with violence, answer in kind.  Oh, and by the way, war is bad, m’kay?

There are a few fun and rather impressive (for the time) special effects at the beginning and end of the film, but we have to sit through an awfully boring second act.  About the only thing about the film I found to be interesting or entertaining was Bernard Hermann’s musical score.  Outside of that, the acting is flat (especially from Patricia Neal), the story is boring and the message is confusing.  And yet this is considered one of the classics science fiction cinema.  Maybe that’s because it’s the product of a different time.  And though it would be fair to argue that our current geopolitical situation isn’t all that different, there have been many better, more interesting and scarier movies that depict our fallen world.  Look those up instead.