I just watched The Day the Earth Stood Still down at the local cinemaplex. Assuming that everyone reading this has at least seen the original, I’ll share my thoughts without fear of spoiling.
I was struck by how this new version had to fit itself around the cliches of the first contact genre, many of which were established by the original movie. In theory, first contact ought to be a perfectly novel event. We have no way to predict any of the behaviors or attributes of an alien race that comes to visit. In fact, using the term “alien race” already reveals a profound cultural bias and unfounded assumptions that might prove to misdirect our thinking when an actual first contact occurs. Our first exposure to the alien is likely to be far more alien than we can currently imagine.
So it’s disappointing when a work of fiction chooses to avoid creativity in favor of banality, even when they have all the license in the world to go crazy.
Instead of giant saucer-shaped craft hovering over our cities, as in V, Independence Day, and Alien Nation, this new version of The Day… has a glowing orb falling out of the sky, as in Starman. Once the orb lands, we see a circle of military hardware within yards of the alien craft (even though the military is perfectly capable of taking cover and firing from a distance). It’s essentially identical to the scene in Mars Attacks, although to be fair, that scene was itself a parody of the original The Day….
We see the government struggling to assemble a team of experts to combat the situation with the power of their brains.
I noticed that unlike the team of experts from Niven and Pournelle’s Footfall, there were no sci-fi writers. Presumably this was an oversight on the part of the screenwriters. I assume that there is an actual government first contact list of experts who will be yanked from their residences and places of employment with spectacular government-priority expediency. That comes under the jurisdiction of FEMA I think, and I’m sure that they have a perfectly competent plan prepared in case of alien appearance. And presuming that a sci-fi writer or two is on that list, next to all the nobel-laureates and theoretical exo-biologists, who would represent our august body of literary thinkers?
Greg Bear and David Brin both come to mind as likely candidates. Brin is an actual scientist, and the alien races he’s created have been some of the more imaginative in the genre. And Bear’s Blood Music, although not technically about aliens, had a pretty compelling conception of the essence of alienness. I think I would just feel a little more comfortable if the two of them were at Obama’s elbows, telling him what to do about that glowing orb on the Capitol lawn.
As far as fictional accounts of first contact, we should be looking to different models than the The Day the Earth Stood Still, which is essentially a big-screen knock-off of Columbian discovery or the landing of Father Marquette in Green Bay.
I’ve been impresssed by Ian McDonald’s Evolution’s Shore and Charles Stross’s Singularity Sky. Both embrace the unbridled craziness of the unknown, as well as the likelihood that extra-solar transportation will be on a microscopic scale and then unpacked through genetic or micro-computing manipulation.
And in terms of the sheer unexplainable bewilderment of first contact, I highly recommend Stephen King’s From a Buick 8. Yes, I just said that. Drawing heavily from the Lovecraftian principle of alienness as the foundation of terror, King goes further to throw in the inexplicable and the capricious banality of minds with goals and thoughts far removed from our own.
Of course these names could never go on the FEMA first contact team list. Stross and McDonald are British nationals and therefore unqualified to advise the leader of the free world in issues affecting the planet. And Stephen King must never ever ever be allowed near a representative of an alien race.
Other than all that, the movie was a bland remake with some bland CGI effects popped in to spruce it up. Keanu Reeves was a good choice to play Klaatu, because Keanu not only has a name similar to the alien’s, but Keanu is also remote, wooden, and alien at the best of times.
My biggest complaint is that they changed the big warning from “Stop being warlike jerks” to “You’re hurting the planet.” I admit that in the decades since the original movie came out we’ve pretty much solved that whole war problem, but I had no idea that the aliens were such a bunch of hippies.
Here’s an example of alien hippie stupidity. A little boy is at his father’s grave, begging Klaatu to bring his father back to life. Klaatu responds “Nothing in the universe is ever lost. It is simply transformed.” His dad is being transformed into dirt, which isn’t a huge freaking help, Klaatu.
Let’s get a few things straight. No matter what that sweater-wearing wimp-bag Al Gore may have told you, we are not going to wipe out all the life on the planet. We simply do not have the technological ability to do that, even if we tried. Have you ever tried to get the silverfish out of your basement? Now try doing that to every microbe and insect on 300,000,000 square miles of land, water, atmosphere, and subterranean air pocket.
Which is not to say that I think we’re being good stewards of the planet. I think it’s likely that we will wipe out most land animals larger than a hatbox. But as large-scale extinctions go, the Earth’s gone through much worse, and it’ll go through more when we’re gone. Nothing is more natural than mass-extinctions.
There is no way that an impartial outside observer is going to be any more concerned about humanity than they would about sulfur- or oxygen-emitting microbes. Globally devasting organisms are just something that happens in a dynamic evolutionary system. Give it a million years and it’ll smooth itself out. And as empty ecological niches are re-filled, you’ll have twice as many new species than what you lost.
It’s just another fashionable Western idea that there’s a dichotomy between the natural and unnatural, as if everything that we’ve done is somehow the counter-balanced half of all the giant and subtle works of nature, as if the silverfish know the difference between your basement and the underside of the log. The works of man are just another ecosystem, no better or worse than the deserts of Mongolia or the prairies of Manitoba.
When Klaatu’s machines threaten to commit anthrocide for the sake of all the other species on the planet, it doesn’t seem like the voice of conscience. It seems a lot like the misanthropic reprisals of anguished white Americans against indigent farmers in the Amazon rainforrests, or seal hunters in Hudson Bay. Privileged eco-activists don’t care about what families and what livelihoods are destroyed by their ideology. They just want to save the pretty butterflies and the fuzzy-wittle seals, no matter the human cost.
So, yeah, when the helicopters come to take me to the first contact team, I’ll be advising President Obama to nuke the hippie bastards.
Now if only the aliens will deliver a dire warning to keep us from remaking classic films.
