It’s nice to know that there’s still a reasonable rate of exchange for expectations; I wasn’t expecting much walking into this movie, and not much is precisely what I got back in return. I recently read a justification of remaking a seminal film like The Day the Earth Stood Still where the writer noted that John Carpenter’s wicked version of The Thing, and John Sturges’ Western-ized Kurosawa film The Magnificent Seven as two remakes done right. Fair enough, but the difference between those movies and this one in terms of the justification of their existence, is that they both brought in something different. In this Day, even the original stuff is borrowed from somewhere else.

Like the original film, TDTESS starts off with the landing of an alien spacecraft… No wait, that’s not true. It starts with a bearded Keanu Reeves in what a title card says is the Tibet mountains in 1928. In the middle of the night, he finds a glowy orb thing in a snow bank and it knocks him out. When he comes to the glowy orb thing is gone, and Keanu is left with that stunned look on his face. You know the one.

Flash-forward 80 years where, in a sequence that quite nearly copies the first 15 minute of the pilot episode of The 4400 line for line, a object believed to be an asteroid approaches Earth at faster than lightening speed. Landing in the Central Park, this huge glowy orb is the vessel of Klaatu (Reeves again), an alien in human form with a permanent “What the…?” look sewn on his dome. Things proceed as expected. Klaatu has a dire warning for Earth’s leaders, but the tough-as-nails Secretary of Defense (Kathy Bates) says no dice. Instead, an empathetic scientist (Jennifer Connelly) helps Klaatu escape to see her mentor Prof. Barnhardt (John Cleese) to receive the aliens’ message: “If the Earth dies, you die. If you die, the Earth survives.”

And if there’s anything less believable that Keanu Reeves making a life-threatening ultimatum, than I’d like to hear it. In this version, the warning’s a little more forceful and that was alright with me. What I think I missed though was the message of choice, of free will. It’s not enough to have to change, but rather we all have to want to change for it to work. The thing of it is, the earlier film was filmed with characters that you know have that change within them, but this film leaves that a little more ambiguous, that it only ever occasionally feels realistic.

Now ‘realistic’ is a relative term in science fiction, and you know that when Independence Day features a more plausible military reaction to the sudden appearance of a UFO, you know your movie’s in trouble. No sooner is Klaatu off his ship that he’s shot, where in the original film it’s not until he reaches for a device on his person that he’s shot in a mistaken interpretation of intention. Basically, the military as presented in the film is the stupider pastiche of far-left view of the US Armed Forces. In other words: shoot first, no questions later. In this atmosphere, it’s no wonder that Klaatu yawns and says something to the effect of, “Eff it. Let ‘em burn.”

Other changes between the versions are fairly pronounced, but none more so than the robot Gort. In the Robert Wise film, Gort is obviously an 8-foot guy in a grey suit and helmet, so naturally for the remake he has to be all CGI. But not only does Gort get a cool, little U.S. Army sponsored acronym ("Genetically Organized Robotic Technology"), but he’s also the doomsday device as he turns into a locus-like cloud of nanotech bugs not completely unlike the Old Smoke Monster from Lost. One detail I did like was Klaatu’s umbilical spacesuit that he arrives on Earth in; an organic sack that protects the alien until he arrives on Earth and then falls away, making it so the occupant is “born” on Earth and able to adapt to the environment.

And the kid, this time played by Jaden Smith (son of Will) is such a little bastard at first, wanting his stepmom to forget helping the alien visitor and instead work to kill him; that’s the American way, and that’s what is father, an army engineer, would have done if her weren’t killed in Iraq. So the kid’s not going to be down with the alien, as he was in the original, no big deal, but why does he have a sudden change of heart? And Mad Man Jon Hamm has less-than-nothing to do as a NASA scientist who seems to be around to introduce the situation and die pointlessly later on. This means that the acting heft of the film lies on the considerable talents of Keanu Reeves, who only excels when the moment requires a blank stare or dryly delivered observation on human nature.

One thing that I’ll say in favour of the remake is that it looks great, and when it manages to get over itself, you can see a kernel of really good movie just waiting to be popped. I also liked John Cleese’s take on Barnhardt, and he and Reeves did a really great job of hitting the beats of what, in some ways, is the film’s most important scene. In fact, I would compare it to the back and forth between Michael Rennie and Sam Jaffe in the ’51 version. But getting a few things right only gets you so far in remaking a classic, especially when so much of what you do is automatically held up to the scrutiny of comparison.