The Day The Earth Stood Still Official Trailer

[Mr.Teehehe]

Discuss

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UULvGwjEpuA

Since i know that some aren't glad at all that this is being remade.

Starring Keanu Reeves and Jennifer Connolly

 

[Violetta]

I hate Hollywood. I mean, you have no idea. For the better part of this decade I've been praying for a few original ideas to hit the screen. Less remakes of older movies (or not so old movies in some cases), and more adaptations of stories that've never had a chance at silver screen glory.

But this? This is just going too far. It's like taking a shit on one of the original classics of Sci-Fi. Just once I want to meet the morons who greenlight stuff like this and ask then for an honest answer; Why do you think these movies are a good idea at all?

 

[the_jimmy_james]

I think it's because they're dipshits.

 

[FeatherDaemon1]

This is one movie I will not see. From what I've read about it, it is just going to be one giant environmental bitchfest. I wouldn't be surprised to see Al Gore propped up as Gort. I understand the concept of the original being anti-war, anti-nuclear but I just know that Hollywood as it stands today will just have no sense of balance. I wonder if the re-make they use Lincoln's Address as example of the good that humanity has to offer. Nah... I'll stay with the classic.

 

[Low_Roads]

I've already seen the trailer as a theatrical preveiw. Reeves doesn't posses remotely enough gravitas to pull off the Klatuu role (as originally essayed by Michael Rennie). A remake might have had some value of it had introduced more unused aspects from the source short story ("Farewell to the Master", by Harry Bates), in which Klatuu is little more than a prop. That clearly isn't going to happen: the literary template doesn't offer the showy, empty spectacle movie audiences can't live without. God forbid anyone should enjoy a low-key procedural... it'd probably be better suited for TV anyway.

 

[Senshi1]

I like alien movies, so I'll check this one out expecting an entertaining flick rather than a thought-provoking drama. 😛 Thanks for sharing.

 

[frylock111]

Hm. Honestly, I'm surprised it took Hollywood this long...they've been doing this sort of thing to horror for years.

 

[HOLLYWOOD]

the hollywood brother is not sure if he will see it or just wait to it come on home box office

 

[scavenger]

Actually I've seen the original. The title promises something really spectacular, but regardless of the time when it was made, I don't think it came across as such. I had been expecting a lot of cool vintage stuff like cardboard ufo's and scale-model explosions, or stop-motion aliens, yet all we got was images of traffic standing still...

It had cool 50's "alien intro music" though...

I don't think this new movie should be regarded as a remake, sure it retains some elements from the original movie, but the story looks so wildly different it's hardly a remake at all.

I won't go watch it at the cinema though, but that's mostly because the prices of movie tickets are ridiculously expensive these days -I'll rent it for a fraction when it comes out on dvd.

 

[Senshi1]

Yeah, it seems like a lot of people are determined to hate remakes on principle, which is a shame. Take War of the Worlds (Tom Cruise) - it may have been hugely different from H.G. Wells's novel, but it was still a great movie. The effects were good, the story was gripping (although the farmhouse scene was a little slow in my opinion), and it was just exciting. I wasn't bored watching it, I was glued to the screen - surely that makes from a good movie? If they'd titled it someone else, the complain would have been "meh, it was ripping off War of the Worlds", so you can't really win.

Although admittedly, some remakes are just plain terrible, like The Omen in my opinion.

 

[BigNorm]

i don't have faith in it, i might catch it when it hits HBO.

 

[scavenger]

War of the Worlds. Perfect example.
I read the book by HG Wells about 10 times or so. I love that book. I have the album of "Jeff Wayne's War of the Worlds Musical version" which differs from the book, but I love it too. And the Tom Cruise movie is a great one in its own right. Personally I liked the squid martians from the book better, but hey, that's just a design detail.

Take the movie Solaris. I was very sceptical when watching that one (because I really, really like the russian original by Tarkovsky) but it turned out to be quite an enjoyable movie. Perhaps the set design wasn't as groundbreaking as the original had been, and perhaps the philosophical aspect wasn't that much present, but still it felt like a good movie.

Remakes aren't necessarily bad movies. They should be viewed as movies in their own right, wether they are bad or good movies on their own.

 

[FeatherDaemon1]

Concerning remakes in general, I do understand the pushback that people have against re-makes. The feeling is that Hollywood is out of ideas so they pilfer and end up butchering old ideas. I sympathize with this sentiment though I don't hate remakes in general. I will review re-makes with a bit of jaundiced eye though. The bar is higher to win me over. Why? Because I don't like them butchering classics which they have done. Halloween is a prime example of that. Zombie should never have touched it. Dawn of the Dead, I went in to dead set to hate it, but I ended up liking it. So I won't totally rule out a re-make. That doesn't change how I feel about The Day The Earth Stood Still. If I catch one glimpse of Captain Planet I am out of there.

 

[frylock111]

The only problem I have with remakes is this:

They're usually failures in relation to the source material from which they draw inspiration, and they usually fail in their own right. They lack any real substance, whether borrowed, stolen, bastardized, or original. War of the Worlds, IMHO, was just a Tom Cruise movie with aliens. It bore little resemblence to the original source material--making it a bad remake--and fell in line with the recent trends of cheap suspense, overdone special effects, and shallow storyline. Substance? Who wants that when we can have STYLE?

That's where deference to the source material comes into play. Why did the Dawn of the Dead remake succeed? Because, like the original, it wasn't so much about a zombie apocalypse as it was about human society falling apart on every social level when faced with extreme stress and danger. John Carpenter's Halloween was a study in evil and a masterpiece. The character of Michael Myers was frightening because, in that opening sequence, we see a sociopath (in the form of a child) at work. Unlike the hillbillied version that Rob Zombie brought to us, this classic Michael is a young, seemingly affluent boy with no real reason to kill anyone, let alone his (we can assume) beloved sister. John Carpenter makes the audience face the possibility that this boy is just bad. He was born bad, he will die bad. That's the real horror of Halloween, and Rob Zombie missed it. See, good remakes (and movies, really--or, perhaps I should say "films") aren't about the flash and glitz, but rather about heart and soul.

As for the original version of The Day the Earth Stood Still, I'm quite shocked and more than a bit appalled that one wouldn't recognize how "vintage 50's special effects" would have ruined a little thing in the movie called "atmosphere"--the very thing that has made it a sci-fi legend, and the one thing that will likely be lacking from the remake. Truly, you missed the point and, likewise, the best part of the original. But, that's the majority of this generation of movie-goers, isn't it?

To paraphrase KMFDM (and to close my rant), pop-culture is the only kind of culture we're ever going to have.

 

[the_jimmy_james]

See...

When something is based on literature, somehow I don't feel the same way. War of the Worlds has been used many times... but that was literature first. The 1950s version with alien designs by the immortal Wah Ming Chang (co-designer of the original Star Trek USS Enterprise and Klingon battlecruiser) was the SECOND popular media version.

Orson Welles made War of the Worlds famous with his radio version some 20 years before. The Steven Speilberg/Tom Cruise version was a very, very worthy successor. I completely enjoyed that film. It had everything I expected. Horror, fear, terror, suspence. That was one of the most enjoyable film experiences I've had in the last decade.

But "Day The Earth Stood Still" was created as a cinema piece. I feel insulted that this bit of history that I feel is important to the development of film as we know it is about to be marginalized by a "big budget Hollywood Remake".

Fuck these guys with the Michael Bay mindset.

"I'm a 2000s Hollywood guy. I'm God's gift to the world."

 

[frylock111]

See...

When something is based on literature, somehow I don't feel the same way. War of the Worlds has been used many times... but that was literature first. The 1950s version with alien designs by the immortal Wah Ming Chang (co-designer of the original Star Trek USS Enterprise and Klingon battlecruiser) was the SECOND popular media version.

Orson Welles made War of the Worlds famous with his radio version some 20 years before. The Steven Speilberg/Tom Cruise version was a very, very worthy successor. I completely enjoyed that film. It had everything I expected. Horror, fear, terror, suspence. That was one of the most enjoyable film experiences I've had in the last decade.

As I said, it's possible to show deference to the source material by staying true to the themes and rough atmosphere. I felt the Cruise movie only scratched the surface, if that.

But "Day The Earth Stood Still" was created as a cinema piece. I feel insulted that this bit of history that I feel is important to the development of film as we know it is about to be marginalized by a "big budget Hollywood Remake".

Fuck these guys with the Michael Bay mindset.

"I'm a 2000s Hollywood guy. I'm God's gift to the world."

I think we can both fully agree on this point. It's all about the director's "vision" anymore, even if that vision is obviously blurred.

 

[Rox_My_Sox1]

There is only ONE KLAATU and he is Michael Rennie. ^_^

 

[the_jimmy_james]

I think we can both fully agree on this point. It's all about the director's "vision" anymore, even if that vision is obviously blurred.

Definitely. There's no thought given to aesthetics, creativity, originality, anything. It's all a showcase for a director's ability to tell a guy to use fancy CGI (Star Wars Prequels), or zoom the camera in and out a lot (New Battlestar Galactica), show fuzzy, out of focus glimpses of things (Cloverfield) or tear a lot of stuff up while really bad 1990s comic relief happens (Transformers).

The performances of the actors grow more and more boring because the directors don't give them anything to work wtih. They're just dolls reading lines while lots of fancy stuff happens around them.

I'm not going to pan the use of effects, or creative cinematography, it's just that it seems like Hollywood has this obsession these days with tooting its own horn and saying "Look at this fancy stuff. See how great it is? Really creative movies that tell good stories don't have this amusement park crap, so ours is better, right?"