The Day The Earth Stood Still Movie

AFI's #5 Science Fiction Film - To Kill a Mockingbird

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The Day The Earth Stood Still

The Day The Earth Stood Still is a classic black and white science fiction movie from 1951. The DayThe Earth Stood Still was directed by Robert Wise and features a score from Bernard Hermann, and stars Michael Rennie, Patricia Neal, Sam Jaffe, and Hugh Marlowe. Edmund H. North was the screenwriter for The Day The Earth Stood Still, which he adapted from a short story called "Farewell to the Master" from Harry Bates.

The Day The Earth Stood Still Robot

The Day The Earth Stood Still had a clear influence on later science fiction films, and the robot in The Day The Earth Stood Still is one of the best examples of that. The robot's name is "Gort", but his "eyes" look almost exactly like a Cylon's. (It would be more accurate to say that a Cylon's eyes look more like Gort's.)

I read that the actor who played Gort was actually 7'7" tall in real life.

The Day The Earth Stood Still Saucer

Another obvious influence that The Day The Earth Stood Still had on later science fiction movies was the portrayal of the saucer. It was THE classic flying saucer, glowing, round, and an obvious influence on the saucer from Close Encounters of the Third Kind. (Although flying saucers were featured in dozens of other scifi movies for decades after this.)

The Day The Earth Stood Still Movie Review

I liked the movie, but it's hard to think of The Day The Earth Stood Still in the same class as To Kill a Mockingbird. Science fiction is a harder genre to make into a classic film. My son enjoyed the movie too, but said it was boring and "really old". Changes in how science fiction movies are presented have been so dramatic that I can understand his reaction.

On the cover of The Day The Earth Stood Still's DVD case is a blurb that the movie's message is just as timely today as it was in 1951. I'm not sure that this is true. The theme of the movie is that people are violent and dangerous, and that we need to evolve beyond that in order to move forward in the universe. This theme is clearly related directly to nuclear weapons. But in today's environment, terrorism and biochemical weapons are at least as great a concern as a full scale nuclear war. And global warming is another concern people have.

It's not that the message of "nuclear war would be awful "no longer resonates. But so many other new worries compete with the fear of a nuclear war that this particular warning seems dated.

I enjoyed the movie, and I thought Michael Rennie's performance as the alien Klaatu was really great.

I read in the Wikipedia article about The Day The Earth Stood Still that a lot of the movie features religious allegory, which I completely missed at the time, but now that it's been mentioned, it is pretty obvious. Klaatu is obviously a Christ like figure, bringing a message of peace to the world. Klaatu even decides to live as a man in order to better understand what humanity is going through. Like Jesus, Klaatu also dies and is resurrected, but only temporarily. At the end of the movie Klaatu leaves in a spaceship, which is comparable to Jesus ascending into heaven.

The Day The Earth Stood Still Remake

A remake of The Day The Earth Stood Still is scheduled for December 2008. I've seen the trailer, and it look like the remake is going to be at least superficially very similar to the original. (It's hard to tell from a 2 minute trailer though.) Keanu Reeves is an interesting choice to play Klaatu, and I'll be interested to see what Gort is like in this movie. The coolest scene in the trailer, for me, was watching the lights go out all over the world. I hope it turns out well.

We haven't decided yet what our next movie will be, because we took a day off yesterday, but I'll post about it here when we do.

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