|
 The
Day the Earth Stood Still (1951)
R1 / NTSC DVD
Twentieth Century Fox / 2003
Director: Robert Wise
Writers: Edmund H. North & Harry Bates
Cast: Patricia Neal, Michael Rennie, Sam Jaffe & Hugh
Marlowe
Review by James Garfield
The human population of the planet Earth is startled when a
flying saucer enters the atmosphere and touches down in
Washington D.C. Civilians and military gather around this
strange object, and watch as Klaatu (Michael Rennie), a
humanoid in a spacesuit, and his huge robot servant Gort
(Lock Martin), emerge from it. A soldier fires upon Klaatu
when he brandishes a strange object, and the military spirit
him off to a hospital. There Klaatu quickly heals himself
and announces that he has a plan behind his trip to Earth,
but he will only disclose it to an assembly of the heads of
all the planet’s nations. Officials tell him that would be
something quite difficult, and Klaatu escapes from the
hospital. Will the world’s leaders listen to Klaatu’s
message of peace, or will his people have to launch a
“pre-emptive strike”?
It’s difficult to say more than has already been said about
one of the classics of the 1950s golden age of cinematic
science fiction, the film that gave us film geeks the phrase
“Klaatu barada nikto.” It stands out in having a seemingly
anti-war and anti-nuclear message, as opposed to all the
other movies which depicted aliens solely as threats that
need to be obliterated. Here, it is the aliens who see the
Earth as a violent planet, and the inevitable human travel
into outer space as a potential threat for the entire
universe. Klaatu wants us to resolve all our conflicts
before we launch out into space, OR ELSE he will have to
order the annihilation of Earth. On the DVD’s commentary
with novelist/screenwriter Nicolas Meyer and Day director
Robert Wise, Meyer mentions the irony of this “violent
pacification” policy, and Wise doesn’t really have an
answer. Even if the film doesn’t present an airtight
ideology, it still leads to further thought on a very
important subject, in the context of a very entertaining
genre picture. |
