The folks over at AintItCool News have landed the first review of the upcoming remake of the 1950s classic The Day The Earth Stood Still, and it doesn’t look pretty.
How bad is it? To quote the reviewer, Uncapie, “After I read the script, I threw it against the wall.”
Judging by his reviews, there are a lot of things changed from the original Robert Wise film, and none of them are for the better. Some examples-
- There’s no Gort. Instead there’s a fourlegged thing that shoots lasers and stands up to look like a totem pole that the script calls “Totem.”
- The subtext of the alien visitor Klaatu-as-Christ is entirely lost.
- There’s another alien from Klaatu’s homeworld who has been on Earth, monitoring the planet for 80 years from a McDonalds.
- The immortal phrase “Klaatu Barada Nicto” goes unsaid.
Uncapie’s review goes into further depth on what sounds like several other wrongheaded changes to Day‘s original storyline, characters and themes.
This one sounds like a trainwreck. At this point I’d much prefer to see a movie about an alien that comes to Earth and threatens us all with destruction if we don’t stop remaking our classic works of cinema.
It’s so common that remakes miss the entire subtext of the original in the sci-fi world that it almost goes without saying that they’ll stumble cluelessly through a rewrite. Still, a great original, and sounds like a bad STV remake.