A Stiff Remake Reviewed

File this under "Guess I Won't Bother With the DVD Release" ...

This plot deserves spoilage:

Over the weekend, I watched The Day The Earth Stood Still, a 1950’s sci-fi classic retooled for the present day… if by retooled one means transformed into a nauseating smorgasbord of left-wing cliches. Yowser, this puppy has everything from the Good Muslim to the Trigger-Happy Military to the Evil Guy With The - Ooooh! - Flag Lapel Pin, and those are just for starters. Hey, thanks for guiding us with your moral wisdom, Hollywood Moviemakers - I guess you really do get enlightened during all that time you spend driving between divorce court and rehab.

[SNIP]

Jennifer discovers that Keanu is sort of a spaceman Al Gore - like Al Gore himself - on an enlightened mission to save the earth from pollution. How is he going to accomplish that? Why, by destroying the human race that causes all the mess, of course. That’s right. He’s going to murder every man, woman and child so the trees won’t die. And he’s the good guy!

It must’ve been really hard for the people who made this film to understand why it underperformed at the box office - as hard as it is for us to understand how they managed to give themselves colonoscopies with their own heads. I mean, they actually thought we were going to root for a creature who was going to slaughter our children in service to An Inconvenient Truth.

Gee, I wish I'd written that -- but I would've had to have seen the movie, wouldn't I?

On the other hand, the film is quite remarkable in one sense. It’s the only Hollywood picture I can think of that actually tells the truth about the current environmental movement. By assuming Keanu’s Bizarro Gore is the hero - rather than the destructive, murderous monster that he is - the moviemakers openly confess to us that they, as environmentalists, are human-hating, self-hating cultists worshipping a planet as a god like the savages of old. They actually believe it’s worth hobbling civilization at the very least, and killing the human race in its totality at most, if it will save the precious earth from destruction.

Obviously the Re-makers missed the point of the original movie.