The Day the Earth Stood Still, a remake of the 1951 alien-invasion message movie, builds itself around the not-unrealistic premise that Keanu Reeves is from another planet. With his placid Modigliani face and alabaster skin, Reeves has always had an unearthly quality, the sort of blank-slate handsomeness of a computer game character waiting for instructions. It's no coincidence that Hollywood keeps trying to cast him in science fiction, whether as the data courier hero of Johnny Mnemonic (1995), the messianic action figure at the centre of the Matrix trilogy, or most effectively as the deep cover narcotics cop facing an identity crisis in the Philip K Dick adaptation A Scanner Darkly (2006), in which the trippy animation posed its own apt comment on a star who is both there and not there. Accepting Reeves as an environmental envoy from an alien civilisation is another matter, especially when he has stern news for us, which is frankly old news, about the disasters we have wrought in exploiting Earth's natural resources for our own naked profit. In the early stages of this very, very bad film, Reeves does manage to be the one arresting thing on show, a tight-lipped and sinister emissary who has borrowed human DNA and emits a woozy aura of body-snatcher threat. "We've decided to sedate him," says the US Secretary of Defense (Kathy Bates, modelling this year's neocon winter range, and Sarah Palin's hair), but sedate our leading man any further and he'd be unconscious, surely. As in the original, the character's name is Klaatu, and his arrival is heralded by panic stations, when a large UFO looks set to collide with Manhattan that "U" could be for "unoriginal" and instead deposits Klaatu for an immediately hostile welcome from the US military. Wise's film was a rebuke to bellicose humanity to shape up and stop shooting each other, whereas this version, directed by Scott Derrickson (The Exorcism of Emily Rose), holds its breath before dropping the bombshell that Earth is screwed and it's us (well, America) doing the screwing. At no point are we really invited to imagine what life might be like on Planet Keanu, but it's pretty clear he wants us to be recycling more, and enforced veganism may well be part of the lifestyle. Yes, the movie is instantly silly, but you hold out hope it might at least fall into the good-bad category of The Day After Tomorrow global meltdown with some kick-ass special effects. Unfortunately, every such effect at Derrickson's disposal is just terrible, whether because it's kitsch and cartoonish like Klaatu's protector, a beefy automaton with a Cyclops laser-gaze, or ineffectually abstract, like the tiny metal-eating bugs this thing unleashes, which rampage through the last reel resembling a dull swarm of iron filings. In the Patricia Neal role, Jennifer Connelly is at her most huffy and strained as the widowed astrobiologist who must convince Klaatu some of us care "We can change! We can change!" she keeps pleading, as if parroting Saddam Hussein's ditty from the South Park movie. Even as the film collapses into mush, it keeps embarrassing itself further with pseudy howlers there's a scene where brilliant Keanu corrects a physics equation on a blackboard, to the strains of a Bach aria, and John Cleese pops up to exclaim "It's impossible!" in his best hammy scientist voice. Impossible, we can handle, but the eschewal of all internal logic starts to feel like an insult, the cinematography is dismal, and the cocktail of lazy CGI and po-faced, sub-Al-Gore environment lecture leaves you light-headed with tedium. This week's really out-there acting task falls to Sam Neill, who must convince us in Dean Spanley that he is the reincarnation of a beloved pet spaniel. This he does with a salt-and-pepper beard and some excited sniffing at the bouquet of a rare Hungarian brandy, a treat of the Habsburg dynasty, which is known as Tokai and best enjoyed in its exclusive imperial vintages. Only under its influence is Neill's Edwardian vicar able to open a brief window on his past life chasing rabbits, to a small but astonished audience tempted to ply him with as much of the stuff as they can get their hands on. From all of the above you may deduce that Dean Spanley, adapted from a shaggy-dog tale by Lord Dunsany, is a decidedly odd business, a rummage in mothballed obscurantism for its own sake. How well it slips down is a matter of taste I could have done with a bit more zip from To a Fraser's direction, which strands proceedings too often in a halfway house between the wittily esoteric and the dismayingly limp. Still, Peter O'Toole, as the dog's former master, showboats in a wheelchair like no one else, and turns on the taps at the end like the wily entertainer he still is. The very definition of a curate's egg, it's cautiously recommended.
Author: blacktreemedia
Keywords: filmmaker reel interview trailer keanu reeves
Added: December 12, 2008
