“The Day The Audience Sat Stiff with Boredom”
The Day The Earth Stood Stil gets hammered oh so bluntly.
Keanu’s Klaatu wants a meeting with the UN to discuss mankind changing its ecologically devastating behaviour. Instead he ends up on the run with Jennifer Connelly, forced to stop off at various product placement opportunities to chew over exposition. He is driven around in a nice silver Honda, encountering LG phones and finally, in a note of utter capitulation, meets an alien sleeper agent in McDonald’s. Why not set the whole film in McDonald’s? The Day McDonald’s Stood Still. In fact, why not make the alien spacecraft an enormous floating Big Mac. The bun could flap away like a mouth, delivering platitudes about being a carbon-neural intergalactic burger while we all boil to death.
The combination of greenwash and pansy-waisted Ivy League liberalism reaches retching point about midway through the film when Jennifer Connelly takes Keanu/Klaatu was he cast because of the similarity in names? to meet John Cleese. John Cleese is a Nobel Prize-winning scientist who listens to Bach. Despite hacking into all human communications, the aliens have never heard of Bach – but then iTunes is pretty good at protecting copyright.
Heh, DRM.
A few minutes in the donnish atmosphere of Cleese’s beautiful home goes some way to convincing Klaatu that maybe humanity is not so bad after all. All that’s missing is a scene where Klaatu leafs through a copy of the ‘New Yorker’ and goes hey, we don’t have refined prose like this in on my planet. The clincher is when John Cleese says to Jennifer Connelly, “Change his mind. Not with reason but with yourself.” And you wonder if she is going to have to shag Klaatu to save us all.
Delightful.
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