The Angry Projectionist – ‘The Day The Earth Stood Still’
Saturday, December 13th, 2008
The Angry Projectionist
The Day The Earth Stood Still - Invasion of the bad sci-fi horror remake
I went to see this film bright and early with my dad, who remembers seeing the original as a child. I thought to myself, one of two things can happen: either he gets that warm fuzzy feeling from the re-imagining of a childhood favorite, or he gets to see Hollywood spit on the grave of a classic. I think we got a little bit of both.
Up until about the end of the second act, I was actually impressed. They managed to take the idea of the original story and see how today’s society would react to such a scenario. The whole idea behind the 1951 classic is that a group of interstellar police-types come along and threaten our way of life. They explain that we are killing our planet and unless we stop the human race will be erased, and that not until we change our ways will we be left alone. And this, for the most part is the plot of the first two thirds of the film. Then something weird happens: the writers seem to loose the point somewhere.
The 1951 version was a metaphor that we as a race need to stop and think about what we are doing to this planet and ourselves. It was a story of the human race literally stopping their course of action. This is the case with the newest version, however, I feel like we didn’t learn anything in the end. Instead of us changing to stop our destruction, we convinced our destructors that there is “still good in us.” That while we will continue destroying our planet, we are still “nice” and that “love will conquer all.” HUMBUG!
There is also a strange and unnecessary plot twist in the beginning of the third act that made me really lose hope for this film completely. I was just so upset that they managed to hang on to the real point of the story for so long only to just carelessly drop it and cop out in the end.
There were also a few things that I just wanted to see from this film. For instance: FLYING FREAKING SAUCERS! Not one. Instead we get these big orbs of light. LAME. I want spaceships and I want them NOW. I feel that, in trying to modernize the story, they lost it. But hey, they almost had it.
I’ve also heard a lot of complaints about Keanu Reeves being in this picture. I had no problem with him at all. In fact I think he was perfect for the role. While I can’t take him seriously in a role where he doesn’t say “woah,” or “strange things are afoot at the circle K,” I do in fact buy him as an emotionless alien life-form. I think he should do it more often. I am however, afraid that Jennifer Connelly is starting to type cast herself as the sciencey love interest type. I miss her “Labyrinth” days.
Overall I was able to enjoy this film for what it is at least a little bit. The special effects were pretty cool and I like what they did with the giant robot in the beginning (but not in the end… lame plot twist and all.) But in the long run, if you want to see a good version of “The Day the Earth Stood Still” it already exists and it has for over 50 years. I’m officially done with these bad remakes. It isn’t like the original is gone. I think Big Hollywood needs to put its money and resources into something fresh and new, and leave the classics to the classics
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Book of the Month
Y The Last Man Vol. 5In this final Deluxe Edition hardcover collecting Y #49-60, Yorick and Agent 355 prepare for their ultimate quest to reunite the last man with his lost love, while the person, people or thing behind the disaster that wiped out half of humanity is revealed. Then, Yorick Brown's long journey through an Earth populated only by women comes to its dramatic, unexpected conclusion.
Love conquers all even when we’re a danger to the planet seems to be hollywood’s big cop out lately… reminds me of The Happening. *eye roll* In fact I think the last time I check on rotten tomatoes this had a lower rating than The Happening.. okay now it has a slightly higher rating.. but still… I assume this at least had a decent script.
I’ve got no interest in this one at all, the original is too good, I have that, why would I want anything else.
I think I might me in the minority here, but I never liked the original, and I find that alot of people who say they do actually dont seem to know why they like it that much when probed (Im not saying the people here, I mean friends, coworkers, ect that iv spoken to.). After watching the original, I respect it, but lets face it its EXTREAMLY outdated, and from what iv seen this seems alot more of a popcorn special effects movie.
I’ll give this a shot, i’m not expecting it to be faithful or anything, I just want to be entertained. If I ever get the urge to see the day the earth stood still, and I hate this…… remember that the original still exists.
Great and fair review.
The movie reviewer over on AintitCool apparently liked this quite a bit. I have no reason to not see it, so I’ll probably go in with a pretty open mind. I vaguely remember the original, so it holds no emotional attachment for me…
However, I never bought the “The original is still there, why remake it?” arguments. The original is dated. If you weren’t there when it was released, or shortly thereafter, it is really hard to get into. A majority of people don’t just go back and watch a 50 year old movie.
“A majority of people don’t just go back and watch a 50 year old movie.”
That’s super unfortunate. One of my favorite movies ever is from the 40s.
Great remakes: The Fly; The Italian Job; Ocean’s Eleven; 310 to Yuma; The Birdcage; Cape Fear; Charlie and the Chocolate Factory; Dawn of the Dead; The Departed; Hairspray; The Hills Have Eyes; Peter Jackson’s King Kong; War of the Worlds, just to name a few.
Sometimes an idea’s just too good to use just once.
Ugh. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was one of the worst remakes I’ve ever seen. I didn’t like King Kong, but I can at least see where people would. War of the Worlds was decent, but I thought it was a little skimpy on its soul. Hairspray was really good. The fly was pretty good for what it was, but I never saw the original. The rest I haven’t seen. Unfortunate in some cases.
But any case, I generally like them doing remakes. Some movies become much more accessible like that. But Charlie in the Chocolate Factory is the one remake that pushes me toward the argument against remakes. They took all of the magic out of the original movie, made Willy Wonka REALLY creepy. To me, it basically felt like you are on a theme park ride devoted to the original movie… “And on your left, you will see the room presented in this scene of the movie”. Definitely not for me. Even if I ignore the fact that Willy Wonka was Michael Jackson in disguise.
Ah, the old Willy Wonka is a child molester joke…we meet again.
Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory isn’t a REMAKE of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. They are NOT the same movie by any means. Willy Wonka is based on the book. Charlie is not. And Charlie SUCKED.
Sorry! I got my titles mixed up.
Charlie was based on the book. Willy Wonka was not. Willy Wonka sucked. Charlie rocked.
Thank you! I totally preferred Burton’s take on the story as well.
You can’t beat Gene Wilder, end of discussion!
I’ll take Wilders evil Willy Wonka over Depps mentally challenged one any day.
I never said Willy Wonka was a child Molester. I said Depp’s take on Willy Wonka was “Michael Jackson” like. Don’t put words in my mouth, it wasn’t even what I meant. He looked dead on Michael Jackson, he had weird “theme park” obsessions, he was very childlike, and he was very weird in a way that likely stemmed from family issues. I’ve never heard any child molestation accusations from that story, so you or whoever you heard that from added it all on their own.
Technically, they were both based on the book. It is just that one of them was closer than the other. Still, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory was vastly superior in every way. That includes Gene Wilder vs Johnny Depp, that includes the heart that the movie had, that DEFINITELY includes the two different versions of Charlie and his Grandfather, and it most certainly includes the music.
“The 1971 and 2005 films are consistent with the written work to varying degrees. The Burton film in particular greatly expanded Willy Wonka’s personal backstory. Both films likewise heavily expanded the personalities of the four “bad” children and their parents from the limited description in the book.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_and_the_chocolate_factory#Derivations
Gene Wilder was superb in the original. Johnny Depp was just creepy in an off-putting way. It is definitely my least favorite Depp role I’ve seen before.
to totallynotnick:
of your long list of “great” remakes, I think i can only name about two that i remotely liked. so yeah, i’m gonna have to disagree there. Also with the statement that original films are “outdated.” As someone who has studied the classics, I have a deep rooted respect for a lot of “old” movies out there.
I feel like writers and directors owe it to themselves to really own their work. to repackage someone else’s vision is one thing, but to come up with something yourself is really what it’s all about. And if you truly love a movie that much then it should be fine the way it is.
@AP- I totally respect your disdain for remakes. I’m also a big admirerer of old films, I just don’t mind the concept of remakes.
@Saberj- I love Wilder’s take on the charecter, I’m just also a big fan of what Depp did. That’s what I think remakes should do- tell an old story with a fresh set of eyes.
Pardon my rant.
I’m usually a big fan of Tim Burton’s movies, Johnny Depp, etc. Like Randy, I didn’t care much for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (though I likely thought it was more tolerable than he did), and I too have a deep and abiding love for Willy Wonka (specifically for Gene Wilder’s rendition).
In general, though, I don’t mind remakes so much. On occasion they can be tolerable, and some can become nearly as definitive as the original.
Such is the case of War of the Worlds. I think the recent War of the Worlds was actually a fairly decent (if modern, rather than Victorian) rendition of the story, which mostly gets a bad rap because people aren’t too impressed with Tom Cruise, and because it introduces the children (though Dakota Fanning was used really well, and even added additional motivation for the conflict in the house). I also love the George Pal version, which was a similar modernization for the 50’s (thus the flying-saucer style war machines).
However, the latter is considered rather more iconic than the former, possibly because it was so in-tune with the sci-fi film style of the time. If there’s a distinctive style of the recent version, I couldn’t detect it, beyond the “typical hollywood slick, big budget special effects” that have plagued sci-fi films for the last twenty years or so (Star Wars was the point at which they got hooked on this, but it took awhile for the rest of Hollywood to ramp things up).
Contrast this with the recent Time Machine remake, which completely gutted the story to give it a happy ending, unlike the George Pal version. (I actually quite liked the prop design and art direction of the new film, but that’s probably the main appeal of it.)
My problem with remakes isn’t the idea of remakes. It’s the actual practice of how hollywood does them. I’m not saying “the original exists so don’t bother”; I’m saying “if the original (or first remake, I suppose — everything based on a book or other medium counts as a remake in some sense, IMO) is quite good in its own right and even manages to hold up as a story decades or more later, you damn well better make sure that you either do it properly or do it not at all”. Otherwise, you are just setting yourself up to be poorly regarded.
The odds of Hollywood nowadays doing these things properly are slimmer than not; they have too many chiefs and not enough indians, and most of the chiefs don’t actually understand their audiences or even what makes movies good, they just want their slice of the movie’s income.
The biggest issue I have is when they alter the story, ala the Time Machine.
Such changes are extremely risky; for a story that is regarded as “a classic”, you have no business altering it, because that story has already stood the test of time, and while you are rather unlikely to improve on it, you are *very* likely to remove the things that made it classic in the first place.
I think the usual justification is “updating it for a modern audience”. This is an extremely condescending attitude (it reminds me a lot of the “americanization” that occurs in some anime translation), and it helps perpetuate the “dumbed down” feel a lot of hollywood’s garbage has.
Unfortunately, that Hollywood attitude is infectious, especially in geeks (who like to chase the bleeding edge). People buy into it and start believing that they can’t relate to things older than roughly 1987. Which, to be blunt, is crap. It always struck me as nothing more than an addiction to the surface polish (which is what hollywood sci-fi has focused on for the last twenty years or so, usually to the expense of the actual story), combined with a lack of exposure to older material.
Once they get over this addiction, people can and do get into films dating back to the beginning of motion picture, and for older media, they get into stories going back to the dawn of flipping civilization (The Bible, anyone? Egyptian and Greek mythology? More recently, Charles Dickens? Shakespeare? H.G. Wells and Jules Verne and Edgard Rice Burroughs and Doc E. E. Smith and H. P. Lovecraft?). All that it requires is one to stop believing that “pretty” and “new” automatically equals “better”. (And I say this as a visual artist.). Obviously, it’s great if you can have both very well done effects AND a good story, but if you can only have one or the other, it’s best to make the story good first.
I was born before exactly one of the (classic) films I’ve mentioned was released … Willy Wonka, which I beat by about two months. The others were 1-2 decades before my time, and I’ve had no problem whatsoever getting into any of them (which obviously didn’t occur at birth, so it was even longer than that). I can still get into decent films from that era (or before) with no trouble.
I’ve seen the same thing in video games for awhile now: too much focus on flashy graphics and not enough on innovative, solid, fun, and replayable gameplay. That’s is why nearly every one of the classic arcade games still sees occasional re-releases thirty years later, while the majority of your current titles will be lucky to have anyone who cares in three to five years; fans will be too busy standing in line to buy this month’s newest cool console and plonk down another fifty bucks for installment XXVIII of the series and hoping that it doesn’t rock the boat too badly, while sneering at those who don’t subscribe to their particular relgious sect^H^H^H^H system and game genre choices.
The reasoning is fairly obvious: why spend time and effort to make one game that is genuinely appealing that you can play for years and years when they can phone it in and sell you a whole endless series of games that last 8 or 15 hours and then never get touched again, just by tossing money at the graphics? And the games that genuinely try to break this trend usually get ignored … see Zero Punctuation’s review of Psychonauts, for example.
In summary: my lawn … you kids … off! *shakes cane*
Dyne- Very well put. That’s my feelings on the matter entirely. It’s similar to when an artist covers a song (though, to a lesser degree) if you aren’t bringing something interesting and new to the table… why bother when you can do an original song?
One of my favorite movies is All About Eve. Made in the 50’s I think it’s still insanely relatable and true to the way men and women think, great dialogue and only the clothes and slang are dated. (Truest line ever: “This is Bill. He’s 30. When Bill was 20 he looked 30. When Bill is 40 he will look 30. I hate Bill.”) What makes a movie a classic is when it’s about the things that are universal, the stuff that never changes. I think people are spoiled nowadays on fancy effects and color film. (DO NOT get me started on the re-emergence of colorization. *shivers* Didn’t we realize how stupid that was in the early 90’s?) Heck, we tried showing Back to the Future to a friend of mine’s kids (6 and 13 respectively) and they just couldn’t get into it, which shocked me as those were easily the most re-watched movies from my childhood. And tell me, did anyone see any kids in the theater when they saw Kingdom of the Chrystal Skull?
As for video games I always say- Kings Quest 6 is easily one of the most replayable and fun games ever made and that was released in the early 90’s. Simply because the story was fun, gameplay was easy and the graphics still hold up relatively and the puzzles are still hard yet not unbeatable. Honestly, call me old and stuck in my ways but games with super duper graphics annoy me. I though side scrolling was easy to see better than 3D.
I’ve always said- instead of remaking good movies, why not remake movies that had a good concept, but poor execution? Of course I can’t think of any right now, but I know there must be plenty of those.
Off the top of my head I can only think of Cape Fear, Reefer Madness: The Musical, Pennies From Heaven, 12 Monkeys (a rare case where an American remake of a foreign film is amazing. I still love Le Jetee in its own right too mind you) and if you consider it- Evil Dead 2 as awesome remakes.
As for TV I hold that the Dark Shadows 90’s revival was awesome, and Battlestar Gallactica is- dare I say it?- is infinitely better than the original.
As for the Wonka debate… I never cared for the Wilder version, and the Burton one was so-so. But then, I considered both adapted from the same novel. It’d be like saying that someone can’t adapt another rendition of Three Musketeers or Wuthering Heights or Les Miserables or Shakespeare just because films of those already exist. I don’t consider those kinds of movies ‘remakes’ but rather just new adaptations. I am often more curious of new takes on old novels than a remake of a film that had no other source material. Because I find it interesting how versatile some of those kinds of things can be.
EVIL DEAD 2 IS NOT A REMAKE!!!!!!!!!!
It is a DIRECT continuation of the first film. The first ten minutes is a re-play of the important events of the first film that Sam had to reshoot because ED2 was being produced by a different company than ED1 and he couldn’t get the rights to use clips from the original to use in a “previously on” type opener. The reason it’s only Ash and Linda (with no sign of Scott, Cheryl, or Shelly) was to keep down the cost of the film by not hiring three more actors.
Evil Dead 2 doesn’t actually begin until the next morning when the evil spirits bust through cabin and pick Ash up, spinning him through the trees. It picks up exactly where the first film ended.
I’m sorry, but I’m a HUGE Evil Dead fan and it drives me crazy when people even think about considering it a remake. It’s not even remotely. It’s the 2nd chapter in the trilogy.
I now know how to get to Scot…
@Dyne: Unfortunately, it is not just a hollywood attitude. Whether or not you can manage to get into older movies is moot. What any of us on this site thinks is moot. That is not the typical thought of movie watchers. Most people aren’t going to bother with black and white movies in this day and age unless that’s their sort of thing. We can think however we want about that, but it isn’t going to change that fact.
I have to say though, that I fail to see how that’s “condescending” at all. People always want to see the latest technology used in games and in movies because they become closer to reality. Does that do away with our sense of imagination? To some extent, sure it does. And that’s a tragic loss. But you can’t blame people for wanting things to look closer to how it would actually look. Otherwise there is a sense of detachment in a lot of cases.
To me, I would replace the word “condescending” with “flattering”. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, after all. Instead of getting upset at remakes, people should realize it for what it is. It’s an attempt to re-create the magic that was there before. Is it for the right reasons? Hell no. It’s totally for greedy money grubbing reasons. But the thing is, the movies were considered to be fantastic to begin with, so that speaks volumes for what they feel of the original material.
Now, obviously, often remakes turn into giant flops. But I think that is mostly because of the attitude they take with the property. The attitude that the movie is going to sell itself. All they have to do is give people new pretties to look at, and change a few things, and people will see it. And unfortunately, that’s often the case. But the whole idea behind a remake isn’t horrible. It may never live up to the original. But if it’s even remotely close, then I’m all for the attempt. After all, if all we ever did was make the original and then move on, we would have never gotten The Buffy TV series. The same argument often comes up for sequels. A lot of people don’t like them. But think of all the great sequels we’ve gotten for the mere price of more than our fair share of crap sequels.
To touch on the videogame topic a bit, I just have to say that there is a simple solution for that as well. We start worrying more about the top of the line graphics and less about great gameplay and stories because of three simple facts. 1> Graphics sell games. 2> Games are now so expensive that they no longer get the development time that they need, and the top of the industry writers that they need. 3> The more complex gameplay gets (Like adding a third dimension), the harder it is to pull off. When you have to point horizontally as well as vertically, and still punch…it’s a lot harder to make that fun compared to the 2d version.
Still, each generation will always have it’s games that people remember. The Zelda of this generation will be remembered. Bioshock will be remembered. Halo will be remembered. And each generation has more than it’s share of crap too. There is a lot of it now, sure. But the NES was chalk full of crappy games as well. Just because we can weed them out now doesn’t mean they didn’t exist then.
Back to the Future to a friend of mine’s kids (6 and 13 respectively) and they just couldn’t get into it. It is a very sad day for Marvin Berry and the Starlighters.
That’s weird. I loved watching Back to the Future on TV when I was a kid
TNN & TAAI- I was shocked. They wouldn’t even watch all of BttF 2 which amazed me more- all that future stuff I think was really appealing to me as a kid. *shrug* These kids these days.
Doctor- Apologies. I am a hardcore ED fan as well. I was just saying a case could be made. I see it as the rare case when a sequal can stand completely on its own and still continue a thread from the previous movie.