It was probably incredibly easy to cast the always-wooden Keanu Reeves to play the dispassionate alien Klaatu for this botched and completely flubbed remake of what is considered a classic, not only of the science fiction genre, but of film in general. With the remake of “The Day the Earth Stood Still” Hollywood once again looked to its past in an attempt at mining some creativity and turning it into dollar signs. Creative license for sure, since they couldn’t even seem to keep the basic premise of the Earth standing still intact.
The special effects seemed to be the only thing the directors and producers worried about. Be damned with the story and with the plot. Characters? Who needs characters, they’re just backdrops to the big scary robot and mysterious glowing spheres which have apparently been hidden around the globe since the 1920s observing the human race and the condition of the Earth.
“Your planet?” Klaatu asks of the Secretary of Defense, played gamely by Oscar-winner Kathy Bates, despite a script with the dimensional diversity of a piece of drywall. Of course, the director made Bates play it clueless. As if anyone intelligent enough to serve in the White House… oh, wait… never mind…
Any way, that gets us to the… female lead… played by Jennifer Connelly. Who tries, she really tries, to bring some life to this character, as a spunky and respected astro-biologist. They keep the idea of her being a single mother, with a deceased soldier husband.
But this film team manages to lose the humanity of the relationship Klaatu developed with the boy in the original film – which was one of the prime driving factors in the original for Klaatu to change his mind and give the human race another chance to clean up its act. And they give the audience a little boy who is so mouthy and unlikable that if in Klaatu’s position, would have caused any sentient being of any species to accelerate the plans to eliminate the human race from the planet, instead of halting them.
All in all, “The Day The Earth Stood Still” is so awful in direction, its script, and its plot, that no amount of “gee whiz” CGI animation can save it.
Upon arrival, they are greeted by a bunch of screaming Mayan locals who herd them to the top of the pyramid. The Mayans surround the ruins and our heroes are trapped. Their surroundings: a well, a few tents and a bunch of vines with pretty red flowers. Things fall apart quickly, mostly because of stupidity. A jaunt into the depths of the well leads to a broken back. A pair of legs get broken, and then amputated, in a lovingly sadistic scene that takes forever. One of the characters starts cutting herself with a knife, revealing tiny little vines swimming about in her bloodstream. Turns out that the vines are carnivorous and can talk, sort of – they imitate cell phones ringing and American tourists having sex quite well. The Ruins is part of the Stupid American Tourists Must Die genre, a horror movie that features foreigners killing Americans traveling abroad because they’re Americans. This movie doesn’t work for a lot of reasons, but it boils down to the fact that a carnivorous plant is a pretty goofy movie monster. The special effects – such as they are – consist of moving vines. Wow. None of the characters ever rise above the level of road kill; good thing, because the movie is hard enough to sit through as is, and if we cared about the characters it would be impossible to watch. It’s interesting that the rise of Stupid American Tourists Must Die genre has coincided with the fall of America’s image abroad. One of the characters in The Ruins has a speech that boils down to this: we’re Americans. Nobody messes with us. Not unless you’re a man-eating plant, anyway.
