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.”

My cycling buddy Steve, who writes film reviews for a living (half the people on our Tuesday/Thursday morning training ride work in the entertainment industry or are self-employed — how else to explain why we are all out playing on a weekday morning?!), tells me that I should leave film reviewing to the professionals (the same thing my magician and comedian friends tell me when I feebly attempt magic or comedy) and instead just focus on the ideas.

Okay, I will. Last week I saw the new Nicolas Cage film Knowing, an apocalyptic end-of-the-world Sci-Fi thriller during which I alternated between willingly suspending my skepticism and getting goose bumps when the spooky aliens showed up at the bedroom window of Cage’s on-screen kid, and thinking how I would review the film, which without the willing suspension of disbelief leads me to conclude what most other reviewers thought about it, which is to say “DVD rental at best” (i.e., don’t waste your bail out money on it in a theater).

The plot in a nutshell: Aliens foresee that in half a century’s time Earth’s inhabitants are going to be fried by a massive solar flare, so to warn and save us, instead of landing a spaceship in the heart of Washington D.C. with a giant robot standing guard and a representative calling for a meeting at the United Nations and telling us point-blank that if we don’t do something soon we’re doomed, these aliens decide to be far more subtle. They channel their message through a grammar-school age kid by “whispering” to her a series of numbers without any apparent meaning, which she pencils onto a piece of paper that then gets put into a time-capsule to be opened 50 years hence at the William Dawes Elementary School in Lexington, MA. Wow, what could go wrong? We’re sure to get that warning, right? Cage, fresh off his conspiratorial good will hunting in the National Treasure films (the less said the better, even by my uncritical standards), spends most of the film decoding what the numbers mean—every major disaster throughout the half century, including dates, numbers killed, and Latitude/Longitude coordinates. Except the last two numbers — 33 — are actually backwards: EE, which stands for Everyone Else. As in, Everyone Else is going to die on Earth. Right. Can’t miss that doomsday warning!

In the end the aliens arrive in the nick of time to rapture the children in their spaceships and whisk them away to a new planet, apparently sans adults (Cage is left waving farewell to his kidlet just before he’s turned into carbon cinder), where the human species can start anew. Presumably, with children only on the new planet, it will not dissolve into a Lord of the Flies scenario — perhaps this would make a fine sequel.

Okay, the filmed sucked. But what about the ideas in it? They also sucked. What extra-terrestrial intelligence worth it’s weight in cerebral tissue is going to telegraph its warning through a child’s elementary school time-capsule project, and then just hope that it happens to get opened by the kid of an MIT astrophysicist who happens to be good with numbers, and that this guy — a skeptic to start — suspends his own skepticism in time to decipher the code and save the species? Ridiculous squared.

But the biggest idea problem I have with the concept is that this presumes that the universe is fully determined in a predictable way. It isn’t. Chaos and complexity scientists have discovered that even though the universe is governed by deterministic laws, the systems within it are so complex that they are unpredictable. It is simply not possible — no matter how big and powerful your computer is — to know the position and location of every single particle in the universe and then run a time series forward, say 50 years, and predict that at this exact spot (and not some other spot) a plane will crash and kill this many people (no more no less). So even the fundamental premise of Knowing is false. The film should be retitled Unknowing. Unknowing is the ultimate state of the universe in terms of precise predictability.

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)

Having failed to gain access to the United Nations where he hoped to spread the word of peace and to warn the Earthlings of their impending threat to neighboring planetary civilizations now that the deadly combination of nuclear weapons and spaceflight had been achieved, Klaatu meets with Professor Barnhardt, an Einsteinesque figure who is working on an exceedingly difficult problem in physics that Klaatu helps him solve (like Jesus lecturing the rabbis in the temple). Impressed but still skeptical, the doubting Thomas Professor Barnhardt demands proof of his interlocutor’s divine power, which Klaatu delivers henceforth by causing civilization to stand still for an hour through the cessation of all electrical transmissions. As Barnhardt scrambles to gather together the world’s greatest minds for a meeting with Klaatu, military goons once again show the darker side of humanity by gunning down Klaatu in cold blood, which he, like Jesus, had prophesized to his followers. As he lay dying in the arms of Patricia Neal’s Mary Magdalene figure, he reminds her to deliver a vital message to Gort that has come down to us as one of the most famous lines in SciFi history: “Klaatu Barada Nikto.” Loosely translated: “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.”

Gort gets the message and goes to the government building to empty the tomb and haul the corpse back to the ship, where he resurrects Klaatu. The astonished Mary Magdalene exclaims, in reference to the seemingly omnipotent Gort, “You mean, he has the power of life and death?” The original screenplay called for an affirmative answer to this ultimate how-far-can-science-go? question, but the Breen Censorship Board (a self-policing committee of the film industry) nixed the line, explaining “Only God can do that”. In its stead Klaatu answers, with ecumenical sensitivity: “No, that power is reserved to the almighty spirit.” (In the Boris Karloff version of Frankenstein — Mary Shelley’s science fiction story in which scientists are punished for pushing the envelope of technology — when the monster first comes alive Dr. Frankenstein exclaims “now I know what it feels like to be God.” The voice track was dropped and the background music elevated. I am told, but have not had a chance to check it, that in the remastered DVD of the film the vocal track is restored.) Born again, Klaatu emerges from the ship to deliver his stern warning to the authorities in this thinly veiled defense of the newly formed United Nations:

I am leaving soon and you will forgive me if I speak bluntly. The universe grows smaller every day and the threat of aggression from any group anywhere can no longer be tolerated. There must be security for all or no one is secure. Now, this does not mean giving up any freedom, except the freedom to act irresponsibly … The test of any higher authority is of course the police force that supports it. For our policemen we created a race of robots. Their function is to patrol the planets in spaceships like this one and preserve the peace … At the first sign of violence they act automatically against the aggressor. The penalty for provoking their action is too terrible to risk. The result is, we live in peace without arms or armies, secure in the knowledge that we are free from aggression and war. Free to pursue more profitable enterprises. We do not pretend to have achieved perfection. But we do have a system and it works. I came here to give you these facts. It is no concern of ours how you run your own planet. But if you threaten to extend your violence, this Earth of yours will be reduced to a burned out cinder. Your choice is simple. Join us and live in peace or pursue your present course and face obliteration.

Having delivered his message of threatened destruction and potential redemption, Klaatu’s Jesus ascends to the heavens.

The remake adds and subtracts from the original, and nearly always does so in constructive ways. Keanu Reeves and Jennifer Connelly fill the main characters perfectly, but the director Scott Derrickson and the screenplay writer David Scarpa elevated Helen to an astrobiologist and made her the scientific link to Klaatu. Professor Barnhardt (John Cleese of Monty Python fame who nevertheless sells the character as serious) is working on his theory of “biological altruism” (read evolutionary ethics), added as an element in the story to convince Klaatu that humans deserve a second chance to express our altruistic nature (reinforced by Bach playing on Barnhardt’s stereo — “It’s beautiful” Klaatu says in his transformation from destroyer to redeemer of worlds).

A massive and seemingly unstoppable alien force destroys a stadium in seconds
(photo credit: WETA © 2008 Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation)

Derrickson also skillfully provided an explanation for why Klaatu would be a bipedal hominid (an unlikely product of independent evolution on another planet) — genetic engineering of placental tissue surrounding his original alien body, with embryological development sped up hundreds of times to transform him into recognizably human. “What were you before you were human?” Benson queries. Klaatu’s answer: “It would only frighten you.” That is a far likelier scenario than the portrayal of aliens in most science fiction films.

Derrickson was also a stickler for scientific accuracy, employing the astronomer and astrobiologist Seth Shostak of the SETI Institute to check the dialogue (and chalkboard equations) for precision. As Derrickson explained at a panel discussion on his film at Caltech — joined by Keanu Reeves, Caltech cosmologist Sean Carroll, and JPL roboticist Joel Burdick — Shostak redacted some meaningless mumbo jumbo in the description of the spaceship’s approach to Earth and replaced it with “The object was not following a gravitational free-fall trajectory; as such its path was recalculated.” (The Caltech students delighted in firing both technical and nerdy questions at the panel. For example, question for Carroll: “Are the laws of physics invariant?” Answer: “I see you’ve been reading my recently published technical paper in which I show that it is possible that the laws of nature could be different in different times and places in the universe.” A slightly less technical question for Keanu Reeves: “Are you human?” Answer: “If you cut me do I not bleed?” Nice. My favorite part of the evening was seeing a hand-made sign hoisted by a group of Caltech coeds — probably 800-on-their-SAT tests all — that read “The Day I Met Keanu the Earth Stood Still”.)

Some additions were unnecessary, such as Gort’s name as a military acronym for Genetically Organized Robotic Technology; or heavy handed, as in overplaying the environmental destruction theme by turning the spaceship into a species-saving Ark. At least the robot wasn’t renamed Gore.

Klaatu is no longer Mr. Carpenter, but he fills Jesus’ shoes by resurrecting a Lazerus-like state trooper from the dead. When Benson’s step-son asks Klaatu to do the same for his father who died in the Iraq war, Derrickson self-censored by having Klaatu explain that “there are some things I cannot do.” (Why not? Is resurrection restricted by length of time after death?) Gone too is the electrical blackout, but in its stead (and escalating the seriousness of Klaatu’s warning), the 28-foot metallic Gort dissolves into billions of tiny nanobots that feed on manmade materials — tanks, trucks, cars, roads, sports stadiums, office buildings, and everything else that represents civilization — growing as they spread around the globe. (It’s the grey goo from beyond!) Klaatu has not come to destroy Earth; he has come to save Earth … from us. “If the Earth dies, you die. If you die, the Earth survives.”

The Day the Earth Stood Still has stood the test of time and its remake is far more than that, and well worth seeing. Both touch on timeless mythic themes: destruction and redemption, death and resurrection, mortality and immortality, individual liberty and group unity, national sovereignty and global community, and of course, scientists playing God and technology run amok. Myths, whether in written or visual form, serve a vital role of asking unanswerable questions and providing unquestionable answers. Most of us, most of the time, have a low tolerance for ambiguity and uncertainty. We want to reduce the cognitive dissonance of not knowing by filling the gaps with answers. Traditionally, religious myths have served that role, but today — the age of science — science fiction is our mythology.