Skepticblog

The willing suspension of disbelief takes over Shermer’s brain

I confess — when it comes to writing a film review I’m not much of a skeptic. I wrote my first review about the remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still for Scientific American, a film I really enjoyed … until all my science fiction friends and scientist colleagues told me that they thought the filmed sucked! Wow, how did I miss that? The answer: the willing suspension of disbelief.

When it comes to films and television movies, I suspend my skepticism in order to enjoy the experience. When I watch movies with my daughter she’s constantly pointing out scenery inconsistencies, plot anomalies, and the like, and I’m always telling her that I don’t want to know because it takes me out of the scene and plops me back into my living room, which tends to be a far less interesting place than being on the bridge of the Titanic, inside the pod trying to get HAL to open the pod bay doors, or face to face with Gort the robot, trying desperately to remember what it was I am suppose to tell him so that he doesn’t zap me with his lazar helmet. For the record, it’s “Gort, Klaatu Barada Nikto,” which I translated as “Gort, Klaatu says don’t destroy Earth just yet … and come get me and bring me back to life, because these idiot humans shot me again.” Continue reading…

The remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still delivers a modern warning wrapped in an ancient myth

Klaatu is back and he’s badder than before, with Gort the robot four times the size of the original and a new message for humans to straighten up and save the environment … or else.

The remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still closely parallels Robert Wise’s 1951 science fiction film classic that was a Cold War warning shrouded in a Christ allegory. In the original screenplay by Edmund H. North, an alien ambassador named Klaatu (Michael Rennie) arrives in Washington D.C. in his flying saucer-shaped spaceship (following the UFO convention of the time) with an eight-foot humanoid robot named Gort (played by the 7-foot, 7-inch Lock Martin, who was working as a doorman at Grauman’s Chinese Theater in Hollywood at the time). Trigger-happy soldiers shoot Klaatu and whisk him away to a government facility from which he subsequently escapes and disappears into the city, walking among the common people and eventually taking up residence in the home of single mom Helen Benson (Patricia Neal) under the assumed name Mr. Carpenter (to reinforce the allegory for those who are hard of biblical hearing).

Klaatu’s (Keanu Reeves) arrival on Earth via a giant sphere, triggers a global upheaval
(photo credit: WETA, © 2008 Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation)

Continue reading…