9 / 10
The Day the Earth Stood Still has been adapted twice as a major studio film, in 1951 and in 2008. Robert Wise directed the 1951 original. Scott Derrickson directed the 2008 remake. Both films adapt Harry Bates’s 1940 short story “Farewell to the Master.” Both films center on Klaatu, an alien who lands in a major American city to deliver a message that humanity must change its violent ways or face consequences from a larger interstellar civilization. The 1951 version is the foundational document.
The 2008 version is the more accessible remake. Both deserve attention. The original is the better film.
The 1951 film is a favorite of mine. It’s calm, grown-up and a little frightening, and Klaatu’s warning still lands. The remake I can take or leave. It looks better and says less, and next to Wise’s version it feels like a well-funded echo.
The 1951 film made approximately one and three quarters million dollars on a one and a quarter million dollar budget. The 2008 film made approximately two hundred and thirty-four million dollars worldwide on an eighty million dollar budget. The commercial trajectories are inverse.
The 1951 film was a modest success that became a foundational science fiction text. The 2008 film was a major commercial success that later audiences have largely forgotten. The art held up better than the commerce.
The 1951 Original
Robert Wise’s 1951 version is one of the foundational science fiction films of the early Cold War. Michael Rennie plays Klaatu, an extraterrestrial who lands on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., is immediately shot by a nervous soldier, and spends the rest of the film trying to deliver his message while evading capture. Patricia Neal plays Helen Benson, the young widow who shelters him. Sam Jaffe plays Professor Jacob Barnhardt, the scientist Klaatu eventually contacts.
Lock Martin plays Gort, the eight-foot robot who accompanies Klaatu and who will destroy Earth if Klaatu can’t deliver his message. Few pieces of science fiction music from the period are as recognizable as Bernard Herrmann’s score. Herrmann’s score is a big part of why the original disturbs me. It makes Washington feel strange before anything strange has happened, and I’d put Gort standing silent on the Mall up against any monster the genre has produced.
The film’s political subtext isn’t subtle. The Cold War was active. The atomic bomb was a recent invention. The film argues that humanity is on the verge of destroying itself and that interstellar civilizations have decided to intervene before the violence spreads. The argument is delivered through dramatic action instead of through speeches, though Klaatu’s closing address to the assembled scientists is one of the more direct speeches in 1950s science fiction. It works because the film has justified it through the previous ninety minutes of demonstration.
For Writers
A political argument in fiction works when the script earns it through demonstration before delivering it through statement. The Day the Earth Stood Still spends ninety minutes showing humanity’s reflexive violence before having Klaatu name the problem. The audience accepts the diagnosis because they’ve seen the evidence. The lesson is that arguments in fiction need narrative groundwork before they can be made directly. The action has to persuade the audience before they’ll accept the speech.
Michael Rennie
Michael Rennie’s Klaatu is the foundational alien-visitor performance in American cinema. Rennie was forty-two during filming. He had been a British character actor before this role. The performance is restrained. Klaatu is patient.
He’s intelligent. He’s not afraid. He treats the humans around him with the polite distance of a diplomat from a more advanced civilization who has come to deliver a message that the recipient may not want to hear.
The decision to play Klaatu as recognizably human is structurally important. The character could have been depicted as visibly alien through prosthetics or accent or behavior. The film chooses to make him almost indistinguishable from a calm, well-spoken human.
The choice argues that the difference between humans and the larger interstellar civilization is moral instead of biological. Klaatu can pass as human because he is, in the relevant sense, more or less what humans could become if they chose to.
Rennie is the reason I rate the original so high. He never raises his voice and never pleads, and that calm scares me more than any ray gun would.
For Writers
An alien who’s depicted as recognizably human can carry an argument that an alien depicted as visibly other can’t. The Day the Earth Stood Still makes Klaatu nearly indistinguishable from the people around him. The argument the film is making depends on this choice. The lesson is that the visual presentation of your non-human characters carries thematic weight. Aliens that look human suggest that humanity is on a continuum with other intelligent species. Aliens that look alien suggest a categorical difference. Pick based on the argument you want to make.
The 2008 Remake
Scott Derrickson’s 2008 version updates the premise from Cold War nuclear anxiety to environmental destruction. Keanu Reeves plays Klaatu.
Jennifer Connelly plays Helen Benson, here an astrobiologist instead of a widow. Jaden Smith plays Helen’s stepson, Jacob. Kathy Bates plays the Secretary of Defense. John Cleese plays Professor Karl Barnhardt. The plot is structurally similar to the 1951 version. The threat to humanity is recast as environmental instead of nuclear. The aliens have come to evaluate whether Earth’s life can survive humanity’s destruction of it.
Keanu Reeves’s performance is the remake’s most-discussed element.
Reeves plays Klaatu with the stillness that’s characterized his career. The choice works for the character. Klaatu is supposed to be unreadable. Reeves’s affective range delivers that quality without much additional effort. The performance has been criticized as flat. The defense is that flat is correct for a being who’s processing humanity’s behavior with detached anthropological interest.
I’ll grant Reeves the defense, and I don’t mind him. What costs the remake is everything around him. It has better effects and less nerve, and next to Rennie’s patience it feels like a copy made by people who admired the original without trusting it.
For Writers
A remake that updates the original’s threat from one historical anxiety to another can succeed if the structural relationship between threat and response remains intact. The 2008 remake shifted the threat from nuclear war to environmental destruction. The film’s argument remained that humanity is destroying its environment and that a larger civilization has decided to intervene. The lesson is that remakes can update their context while preserving their structure. The new context has to fit the original argument.
If you change both context and argument, you’ve made a different film and shouldn’t call it a remake.
Craft Note
The Klaatu and Gort silent landing is the 1951 film’s central craft passage. Robert Wise stages the saucer’s arrival through wide shots, deliberate pacing, and specific blocking that builds suspense without dialogue. Science fiction can establish its rules through sustained visual confidence. The audience accepts the saucer because the camera treats it with seriousness.
Is The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951 and 2008) as good as people say?
10/10 for the 1951 original. 7/10 for the 2008 remake. The original is a founding text of American science fiction, and I’d watch it over nearly any genre film of its decade. The remake is competent and better looking, and it still fades from my mind the minute it’s over. Watch the original first. The remake is for completists.
