Let’s say you’re on Netflix and you search for a big, blockbuster movie to add to your queue. Ya know that movie in your search results that’s just below the big, blockbuster movie? The one with the title that’s similar, but not quite the same? With the DVD cover art that’s similar, but not quite the same? Chances are that film is made by The Asylum, a film production company in Hollywood that specializes in what one could call “parasite filmmaking”.

Essentially, The Asylum looks at the movies in production by the big film companies and makes a cheap film with a similar plot (or sometimes not very similar at all), gives it a similar name (a must for their plan to work), and releases it straight-to-DVD just before the big blockbuster comes out in theatres and/or hits DVD. They pick up the scraps from the folks who wanted to rent Transformers, only to find every copy at Blockbuster is checked-out, so they settle for Transmorphers instead.

This is the first in a new series of reviews I’m calling “The Big House vs. The Nut House”, where I’m going to be turning a critical eye at both the big studio Hollywood film and The Asylum’s knock-off to see which is the better movie. Will the multi-million dollar blockbuster and A-list actors beat out the milk money budget and out-of-work porn stars? I have a feeling we might be surprised from time to time…

As this is the first such review, I’m kicking things off with a battle royale.

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SpaceMonkeyX.com presents
The Big House vs. The Nut House: Round 1

featuring:

20th Century Fox’s 2008 film,
The Day the Earth Stood Still
starring Keanu Reeves and Jennifer Connelly
vs.
The Asylum’s 2008 film,
The Day the Earth Stopped
starring/written/directed by C. Thomas Howell and Sinead McCafferty
vs.
20th Century Fox’s 1951 film,
The Day the Earth Stood Still
starring Michael Rennie and Patricia Neal

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The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951)
Let’s start at the beginning with director Robert Wise’s The Day the Earth Stood Still. We need to start here simply because the plot, characters, and themes that will be reflected in the remakes are established here. And to really understand if the other films are successful, we have to know what the original film intended to do and how it told its story.
The film begins off with a rather amazing event – a giant flying saucer touches down on The Mall in Washington D.C. Talk about a grand entrance! The Army is scrambled and soldiers guard the disc while two figures emerge – a giant metal robot named Gort and a human-like being named Klaatu.

As Klaatu walks down the ramp to the ground below, he extends a strange-looking object that is misinterpreted by some nervous young grunt as a weapon. Klaatu is shot in the shoulder, knocking him down and pissing off Gort. A visor on Gort’s face opens up and a laser beam fires out towards the shocked soldiers, dissolving their guns and tanks right before their eyes. Klaatu turns to his robotic bodyguard and, in a strange, alien language, says some magic words that calm the metal goliath.

Klaatu is taken into custody and questioned about who he is, where he comes from, and why he’s here. He tells his captors that he is from an alien world, come here as an ambassador of sorts. His mission is to convince the people of earth to stop fighting amongst themselves. Now that we have nuclear weapons, we are a threat to our own world, as well as the other worlds in the galaxy. Klaatu asks to speak to a gathering of all the leaders of the world, refusing to speak to any one leader, including the President of the United States. Because tensions are high worldwide, the government officials seriously doubt this will be possible. Klaatu says if that is our stance, then he will simply have to destroy us all.

Shortly after his incarceration, Klaatu escapes and blends in with the rest of the human population. He winds up at a boarding house where he is able to rent a room and adopts the name Mr. Carpenter. It’s here that he meets Helen and Bobby Benson, a widow and her precocious son.

Bobby and Klaatu quickly become friends and wander around Washington, sight-seeing and philosophizing about the historic monuments and great leaders of our past. As they wander D.C., Klaatu asks Bobby who the smartest man in America is. Bobby names Dr. Barnhardt, a famous physicist. Klaatu and Barnhardt soon meet and Klaatu tells the doctor about his mission here on Earth. Barnhardt suggests a small-scale show of force to prove Klaatu is capable of destroying the Earth, might convince others to listen.

A few days later, precisely at noon, all electrical power across the globe is shut down. Panic threatens, but 30 minutes later, power is restored. During that half-hour, Klaatu and Helen are stuck in an elevator together. Klaatu tells Helen what’s going on, who he is, and what he’s doing here. Through his interactions with Helen, Bobby, and Barnhardt, Klaatu learns that not all earthlings are heartless, warmongering bastards. So he has decided to prevent our destruction if she’s willing to help him get to a meeting of scientists Barnhardt is putting together.

As Klaatu and Helen run from the authorities, he tells her that if anything happens to him, she must go to Gort, the giant robot standing silently by the UFO, and say the words, “Klaatu Barrada Nikto”, some of the most famous words in all of sci-fidom. This secret message will command Gort not to destroy the planet.

Klaatu is soon hunted by the military and gunned down. Upon his death, Helen goes to Gort, says the words, and Gort comes alive. He retrieves Klaatu’s body from prison and brings it back to the spaceship. There, he places the body in a rejuvenation chamber that brings Klaatu back to life.

When Klaatu is discovered missing from his cell, the military, the police, and scientists brought together by Barnhardt, all converge on the flying saucer. Klaatu comes outside and gives a speech about being responsible to one another, as well as the inhabitants of other planets we will eventually meet. He informs us that Gort was prepared to destroy the earth, but Klaatu is showing us mercy thanks to good people like Barnhardt, Helen, and Bobby. With that, he flies off and those left behind on Earth are left to ponder their fate if they don’t heed the alien’s words.

Released during the heart of the Cold War, the message of finding ways other than war to resolve our differences was quite clear. More importantly, the film gives us some sense of our place in the universe; there is someone else out there and they will not tolerate our immature ways.

There is also a Christ analogy that is commonly mentioned when discussing this film. Klaatu’s message of love, peace, and harmony is similar to that of Jesus. The alien’s resurrection before ascending into the heavens is pretty hard to miss, too. It could even be argued that Helen is a Mary Magdelene proxy, Barnhardt is one of the disciples, and Bobby represents the children who flocked to Jesus to hear his parables, who would become the next generation of Christians. (Believe it or not, but the director never made this connection until years later.)

These types of analogies and themes were unusual for sci-fi in the early part of the 1950s. It was a time when most science fiction referenced Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon, not the King James Bible. This was one of the first sci-fi films that had a relevant message to the audience and couldn’t be written off as simple, escapist fare for kids with over-active imaginations.

As for the production, it’s not a perfect film. Some of the acting is wooden, while some is so over-the-top (particularly Bobby), to almost be parody. However, Michael Rennie is great as the calm, quiet, observant Klaatu. He plays the alien with a wonderful sense of introversion; you can practically see the wheels of his mind spinning to process all the information coming in. And when he speaks, there is a sort of gentle, yet stern detachment that makes sense for a being who has been sent to destroy us, but doesn’t necessarily relish his mission.

The film’s themes are what help it transcend above your standard sci-fi film, but the incredible characters – especially the silent, mysterious, metal monstrosity, Gort – helps bridge the gap between melodramatic morality play to something more. It is truly a classic of science fiction film.

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The Day the Earth Stood Still (2008)
The film starts in much the same way as the original – a mysterious object lands on Earth, this time in New York City’s Central Park, and it’s not a flying saucer, but a giant, glowing orb.

Helen, the once-beautiful, now anorexic, Jennifer Connelly, is not a widowed secretary with a precocious son. No, she’s a scientist who studies spaceborne biology and is called to be part of the science team investigating the sphere. She is actually the one who reaches out to Klaatu as he leaves the sphere and helps him once he is shot by a nervous person with a machinegun. Oh, but this Helen does still have a precocious son, played by Will Smith’s kid. Actually, he’s more of a little brat that needs to be grounded, but that’s what passes for precocious anymore.

This time around, Klaatu’s message is not to warn us to get along. Now he has come to destroy us so that the Earth might live. Our species threatens to make the planet uninhabitable, and Klaatu and his alien brethren can’t have that. He succinctly states his case as: “If the Earth dies, you die. If you die, the Earth survives.” Part of this effort includes hundreds of smaller, glowing orbs that have landed all across the planet. These orbs are like mini Noah’s Arks, collecting animal species so they can repopulate the Earth after Klaatu has killed us off.

After Klaatu escapes Federal custody, he contacts Helen to help him get in touch with Dr. Barnhardt. Along the way, she, her son, and Klaatu encounter government agents, and even an alien mole that has been on our planet for decades.

The end of the film features one major difference from the original: Gort Gone Wild! Rather than simply pose an ominous threat of unspeakable power, Gort – or rather, G.O.R.T. (Genetically-Organized Robotic Technology), as he is now known – breaks apart and becomes millions of nanobots that eat their way across most of the East Coast. The bots consume anything man-made – including men – in an effort to cleanse the planet of our scourge. Klaatu is able to stop G.O.R.T. before he destroys everything, but it costs Klaatu his life (He died for our sins, ya know?).

One of my major complaints with the film is the over-explanation. For example, in the first film, Klaatu looks human. We don’t know why, he just does. Of course it works on a story level, giving him the freedom to wander among us unnoticed, and observe our world to help determine its fate. But it also has a thematic function: “He is Us.” There was no need to explain how he looked human because it wasn’t really about the “how’s”, but the “why’s”.

In the remake, the first scene shows Reeves as a mountain climber in the early 20th Century. During a white out on some remote mountain top, he goes to investigate a small, glowing orb that has appeared from out of nowhere. When he breaks the sphere’s delicate shell with his ice pick, the light emanating from inside absorbs the screen. When he wakes, there is a wound on the back of his hand (I’m sure the filmmakers wanted us to think of stigmata to further the Christ analogy).

So rather than allow Klaatu’s human form to be a mystery, they went and developed a reason why he looks like one of us – the aliens took a genetic sample 100 years ago. What purpose does this serve to know this? And why couldn’t it have been handled with a simple line later in the film? Something along the lines of, “They must have visited before and taken a human DNA sample.” There. Done.

Unfortunately, there’s also a lack of focus that is apparent throughout the film. Even the central theme – we have to be destroyed before we do any more damage to the Earth – becomes muddy and confusing.

If the new message is to take better care of the planet, what, then, would make Klaatu save us from destruction? Does he see a wind farm? Does he see children picking up trash in the park? Does he see a once-extinct condor being re-introduced into the wild thanks to genetic engineering? Is a piece of legislature passed that will reduce greenhouse gases by 50%? No. None of this happens. Honestly, I have no idea what makes him believe that we’re going to suddenly go green.

There is a conversation between Helen, Klaatu, and Barnhardt, wherein the two humans promise Klaatu that we’ll do better. But there’s no indication that these two people speak for the rest of mankind, nor have the power to make this change occur. Klaatu doesn’t really gain any insight on his own like he does in the original that would really make him change his mind about us. He’s basically told that we “super-pinky swear” we’ll start using CFL lightbulbs. And yet that’s enough for him to stop the apocalypse.

I won’t say the film is all bad, though. There are a few exciting action sequences as Klaatu runs from the military, and the scene with G.O.R.T.’s nanobots eating the East Coast are fun to watch if you take them completely out of context. Reeves is fine as Klaatu, though I have to say this version of the character is a little more spiteful and mean-spirited than the original’s pacifist. That seemed to me to be counter-productive if you want to convince the world to listen to you. The special effects are good for today’s CGI standards, though G.O.R.T. never completely works due to his liquid-like design -big and chunky will always be more menacing than big and smooth. Just ask 1998′s Godzilla.

Really what it boils down to is that Reeves’ The Day the Earth Stood Still is the classic example of a needless remake. The new film brings nothing important, visionary, or all that exciting to the table. And the aspects of the original film that have been kept are minimalized to make way for the shiny new special effects and new scenes that only take away the power of the original story.

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The Day the Earth Stopped (2008)
I went into The Day the Earth Stopped with every intention of making fun of it. That was actually my original idea behind this new column, actually. And while the film isn’t good, I was really surprised to see that it actually succeeds in some ways the big Hollywood film fails. Believe me when I say I’m as amazed as you are.

Unlike the other versions, this Day does not feature a flying saucer landing in a major landmark. Surely the budget wouldn’t have allowed for such permits to be acquired. Instead, the first major scene of the film shows numerous objects hurtling through space, heading straight for the Earth. We are soon able to make out that these objects are actually giant robots, whose design is heavily influenced by Japanese manga like “Macross” and “BattleTech”. I have to say, considering the budget for this film, these “mechs” look really cool looming over Los Angeles. According to government agents, 666 of these bad boys have landed across the globe, positioning themselves in major cities. (666? Really? That was the best you could come up with?) So far the giants have been impenetrable by modern weapons (other than nukes, which no one has been willing to try in a city setting), but they seem to just be standing there, waiting.

Meanwhile, a mysterious object lands in the woods outside of L.A. The military converge and capture two humanoid beings, a man and a woman. The man says he is there to help the woman complete her mission – the destruction of mankind. The woman refuses to speak to anyone but Josh, played by the film’s writer/director and 1980s kid actor, C. Thomas Howell, best known for his roles in The Outsiders, The Hitcher, and Red Dawn.

She tells Josh that her name is Sky and, yes, she is here to destroy the Earth unless she can be convinced otherwise before the sun goes down. When Josh tells her the military is going to keep her prisoner, she decides to break out by emitting an electromagnetic pulse (EMP), shutting off all the electrical power and machines in L.A. (Or maybe the world. It’s not really clear just how far-reaching her powers go).

Meanwhile, the sun is getting lower in the sky and the Monoliths (the giant robots), begin to activate, firing rays into the Earth that are slowing the rotation of the core. That can’t be good.

During their escape, Sky and Josh talk a lot about the beauty of mankind, they visit a church, they talk about love, yadda, yadda, yadda. Towards the end of the film, though, the pair sees Judd Nelson (huh?) and his wife who gives birth in the back of a van (they were on their way to the hospital when Sky’s EMP killed the van’s battery). The mother dies in childbirth and Judd, understandably, is heartbroken and happy at the same time. This scene is the final piece of the puzzle for Sky as she now understands that we humans have love in our hearts and are worth saving. Knowing this, Sky not only brings the woman back to life, but stops the monoliths from destroying the Earth.

As you might expect, this film is cheap. That’s kind of the point, though – make it cheap to maximize profits. The film is so cheap that the big government command center keeping an eye on the Monoliths still has old, giant CRT computer monitors. They have drawn up blueprints – actual blueprints that are rolled out onto a table – of the Monoliths, rather than using AutoCAD or some other gee whiz piece of 3D modeling software. The military grunts all run around in SWAT costumes that look like they came from the local party supply store. The main special effect seems to be a white flood light shining from off-camera. Honestly, I’m amazed at how good the Monoliths looked; that’s obviously where most of the money went. So, as far as production value, it’s a flop.

The acting is also less than stellar. I understand that the woman playing Sky is supposed to be an alien, but her acting was particularly bland and lifeless. I’m sure she was hired less for her acting skills and more for her sharp cheekbones, steely blue eyes, and willingness to take her top off. However, I have to give props to Howell, who does a fairly decent job with his part. He was never an Oscar-worthy actor to begin with, but it’s good to see he hasn’t lost the talent he had while out of the limelight. There was one character I couldn’t stand – an assistant to the main Federal agent – but he was the only one that stood out for being really bad. The rest just don’t stand out, which might be worse, actually.

As expected, The Asylum film was not very good. It was definitely B-movie fodder, made for a quick buck to capitalize on the big budget remake. But ya know what, as far as telling a clear, concise story, it actually did a better job than the Keanu movie. And how did they accomplish this feat? They kept it simple and kept certain aspects of the film a mystery.

For example, the Monoliths just appear out of nowhere. They land, probably crushing hundreds of people and destroying buildings in the process, but we don’t ever see that side of things. We don’t know if the military has the robots surrounded. We don’t know if the populace is running like rats from a sinking ship. All we know is what’s happening with Josh, Sky, and a handful of others. We don’t really get a sense of just how big of a deal this event would be without these side aspects, but at the same time, the scenes of mobs running from downtown L.A. are not really necessary to tell this particular story. By focusing on the main story and not concerning themselves with the myriad of surrounding events, or worrying about explaining every detail of the story, the film becomes focused, efficient, and streamlined. All things the bloated, over-explained Reeves version was lacking.

If you think about it, the original film did much the same thing. There’s a flying saucer in Washington D.C. and yet Klaatu and Bobby are checking out the museums and the monuments like it’s just a typical Tuesday. We see Helen and her boyfriend continuing to go out for dinner and a movie. We keep things close and intimate with a core group of characters and it helps us understand what Klaatu sees in mankind that makes us worth saving. We don’t need to know how Klaatu looks human. We don’t need to know how Gort was planning on destroying the Earth. We don’t need to know anything other than what we need to know.

While I won’t be recommending The Day the Earth Stopped, I have to say I’m a little surprised by how well it was executed. For what could have been a complete waste of time, there are enough glimmers of mediocre (not even “good”) to prevent me from completely tearing it a new one. I’ll never bother watching again, but I also don’t feel like I got cheated out of those 90 minutes, either.

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The Scorecard:

The Day the Earth Stood Still (2008)
It’s a little disappointing that the Reeves remake wasn’t handled better, really. Because this is a time in our lives that we could use a Day the Earth Stood Still with a very strong message of change. Whether the focus would have been the environment or the various armed conflicts going on around the world, a story telling us we have to do what’s best for us all if we want to survive, would have been a welcome lesson at the moment. Sadly, this wasn’t the film we wound up with.
Score: 3 / 5 bananas

The Day the Earth Stopped (2008)
As for The Day the Earth Stopped, it was barely worth the rental. But then again, maybe some of the big boys could learn a thing or two about storytelling from small, independent production companies that can’t waste time or money with over-bloated plotlines.
Score: 1.5 / 5 bananas

The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951)
Therefore, with its complex themes presented in a simple, yet thought-provoking way, it would appear that the original 1951 The Day the Earth Stood Still is our clear winner in this battle royale of reviews. It’s simply a perfect example of sci-fi done right. Skip the other two and go with the one that started it all. You won’t be disappointed.
Score: 4.5 / 5 bananas

Look for my next “The Big House vs. The Nut House” review coming soon:

Transformers v. Transmorphers

Posted under ALL, Big House vs Nut House, Movie Journal, Reviews