The Day The Earth Stood Still vs Terminator 2: Judgement Day

So, we think of movies now as having good special effects. But think back to whatever the benchmark is for you for movies not having special effects. Is it pre-Terminator 2? Pre-Phantom Menace? Whatever it is, think of The Day the Earth Stood Still as having come out a year before that. In other words, the special effects aren't good. There's a big robot bodyguard guy that looks like a cartoon. Not cartoonish, but like a cartoon. There are scenes of city destruction that have been portrayed far more convincingly, far more imaginatively, in dozens of other movies. See those other movies instead of The Day the Earth Stood Still (or better yet, don't. I'm so sick of movies built around special effects. Can I just watch some acting now please? I saw this piece of shit, don't I deserve a little payback? Can I go see The Wrestler or something?)

I wouldn't start with a complaint about the special effects, but if you're remaking a sci-fi classic, what's the point if not to update the look? There's nothing timely about the storyline other than a begrudging, "Be nice to Earth". Here's the gist, in case you care (god, please don't. If you care, please lie, for me.) An alien named Klaatu comes to Earth in the form first of glowing goo, then of Keanu Reeves. He was better off the first way. Keanu is there to warn of a pending alien invasion; since he's an alien and he invaded, I figured it went without saying. Anyway, the aliens are invading because Earth is all warm and watery and oxygen-rich, and they want to live here, and since we're screwing it up, they'll just kill us and take our place. Luckily for us, Keanu meets Jennifer Connelly, who is lovely and sincere and needs a new agent. She has a little stepson who bonds with Keanu because the script demands it.

The script demands a lot of The Day the Earth Stood Still, with little reason I could find. For example, why is the kid Connelly's stepson, and not just her son? Why does Kathy Bates play Secretary of State (or of Defense or whatever) and not the President? Her entire part feels rewritten on the spot, as if it had originally been the role of President, but someone realized Kathy Bates was the wrong gender, so they had to add all these qualifiers to her dialogue. She's constantly having to say things like "The President is somewhere secret. I'm acting on his behalf."

It's really bad. Besides the bad effects and acting (the kid and Keanu...ugh...it's not pretty), The Day the Earth Stood Still is full of confusing scenes, like one in which Klaatu intentionally hits a cop with a car to kill him, then hooks himself up to a car battery to bring the cop back to life, but just enough that he's not awake and won't remember being killed, or something. Yeah, it's pretty bad. Don't see it.

Instead, go back to one of the benchmarks of Sci-Fi special effects. It's even got a so-so actor playing a robot who gets paired with an annoying kid (Okay, I know Keanu doesn't necessarily play a robot, but there's certainly an argument to the contrary.): Terminator 2: Judgement Day.

It's basically the same story. A Terminator is sent to early 1990s Los Angeles to protect young John Connor (a voice-cracky, hair-floppy Edward Furlong) from a newer, scarier, special effects groundbreaker Terminator (Robert Patrick, liquid and bad-ass). John Connor's mother is paranoid, ripped and pissed off. Linda Hamilton never got to do much else in her career (well, as of yet), but she's brilliant in this. Besides the effects, she's the primary reason to rewatch this one. Her escape from the mental facility is one of the best sequences of its kind. Everybody in The Day the Earth Stood Still has to philosophize and study their emotions and weigh the pros and cons of humanity and Earth and life and death and so on, and it's so phony. In T2, it's all covered in one line: "Come with me if you want to live." If Keanu had cut to the chase like that (and if Jennifer Connelly had cocked a gun with one hand), I'd maybe see the point of another The Day the Earth Stood Still.

The Day the Earth Stood Still: D

Terminator 2: Judgement Day: A