movies: the day the earth stood still

Since there's a bunch of stuff on at present that we're eager to see, we decided a Saturday movie sounded good and went off to see The Day The Earth Stood Still...

Now, I've only seen the original once... like a billion and a half years ago on teevee, and the only feeling I remember associating with it was a vague sense of boredom... possibly because it's a 50's movie and for the most part they take forever to actually get started. Anyway, I wasn't harbouring any warm fluffy-bunny feelings towards the 1951 version, so I went into the remake with pretty much a blank slate.

And, you know what... it was okay. Sure, it essentially turns into one of the dime-a-dozen "Let's destroy New York" disaster movies (and how hard must it be to get insurance for your building in New York, what with all the rampaging monsters and mutating plagues and alien invasions and floods/freezing temperatures!)

Keanu really does have "weird" down to a fine art... so personally I had no trouble buying him as this "alien in human form". Something I just thought... one thing I miss from a lot of Keanu's more recent work is the big dopey smile he used to have back in the Bill & Ted days... I can't think of one of his a recent movies where he's spent any real time smiling (The Lake House maybe... but I don't specifically remember it).

Jennifer Connelly is fairly solid throughout (I will say that I had more trouble buying her as a "concerned step mom" than I did as whatever kind of scientist she was supposed to be... some sort of "alien biologist" I think)... and it was nice to see John Cleese not hamming it up this time around.

But do you know who really surprised me, acting wise... Jaden Smith (son of Will Smith, obviously). I mean he's a kid playing a kid, so that part really isn't a stretch... but he was actually quite good, he managed a range of emotions, and if that spiral curl in his hair is natural (and sticks around), then look out in another ten years!

I really have nothing to fault the movie on, the effects were about what you would expect from a movie of this scale, every now and again I could pick up when it was obvious CGI (but I do that even when it's really good)... overall it was good, but not outstanding. If I had to sum it up in a word I'd probably go with "solid"... sure the pro-environmentalist message was somewhat on the heavy handed side, but I'm guessing that the message in the original wasn't big on the subtle either.

I'm not sure if it's a good sign or not, but I did leave the theatre thinking "well what's going to happen to them all now?"...

yani's rating: 2 silver nano-bugs out of 5