Entertainment, Movies - Army Times

It came from Planet Dull

In “The Day the Earth Stood Still,” Keanu Reeves is an alien visitor to our little sphere ... but it’s unclear whether he’s here to save us or destroy us.

In other words, it’s a biopic.

Actually, it’s a loud and splashy — but ultimately unconvincing — re-imagining of the classic 1951 film of the same name whose pacifist, anti-nuclear weapons theme has been broadened to encompass the general abuse and neglect that we’re inflicting on our fragile habitat.

An object is detected hurtling toward Earth at a speed of, like, 10 to the eleventy-seventh power cubed; the potential impact would make the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs look like a pebble plopped in a pond.

But the object — a big, swirling orb — slows and softly lands in Central Park. Half the military and all the cops surround it, and a passenger steps out, along with his 20-foot-tall robot pal, Gort.

Of course, the alien passenger doesn’t get two steps before some nitwit fires on him. He’s rushed to a hospital where a bunch of scientists await, including Dr. Helen Benson (Jennifer Connelly), stepmom to young Jacob (Jaden Smith, Will’s kid), whose Army engineer dad was killed in Iraq a year earlier.

The alien sheds its outer skin and out pops Keanu ... uh, Klaatu. Of course, the secretary of defense (Kathy Bates) demands to know his intentions.

Klaatu says he is “a friend to the Earth” — but that doesn’t necessarily mean he’s a friend to the bipeds atop its food chain.

Turns out Earth is one of only a few planets in the cosmos that can support complex life, and the advanced civilizations that Klaatu represents believe they can’t sit idly by as humanity obliviously destroys it.

And of course, it falls to Helen to convince him that we can and will change (though just how we might do that is never broached).

The film is fun in its tense buildup phase. But once Klaatu’s mission is made clear about halfway in, the air starts seeping out and the film gets smaller, not grander, as it goes along.

Still, there are pleasures along the way, such as the scene in which Helen takes Klaatu to visit a Nobel-winning scientist pal (John Cleese) and watches them trade dueling physics equations.

And the way Klaatu plans to erase humanity’s footprint — a mammoth swarm of ravenous nanite locusts — is a CGI hoot, especially when it razes Giants Stadium to its turf in three seconds (a scene in the film’s ubiquitous trailer, so I’m not revealing any great secret).

But amid all the flash, the story doesn’t have much heart, and the acting is negligible. Klaatu is the role Reeves has been waiting for his entire career, since he doesn’t even have to try to display the acting talent that he’s never had.

Everyone around him seems to have caught that bug. Connelly, who used to carefully and wisely choose interesting roles, clearly has dumped that game plan. She plays virtually the same thin character here as she did in “Hulk,” and she does nothing new with it.

And remember how cute 8-year-old Jaden Smith was in “The Pursuit of Happyness”? That’s how annoying he is now at age 10.

But what really sinks the film — warning, spoilers ahead for anyone who didn’t see the first film — is the contrived shallowness of Klaatu’s late-inning call to give humanity a shot at redemption.

All it takes for him to halt the planetary reboot is the sight of Helen and Jacob embracing at the grave of the boy’s father — this after Klaatu has been peppered with a stream of TV news images of rampaging mobs hysterically looting and pillaging around the world because they think the End Times are nigh.

I don’t think so.

Good thing Klaatu didn’t get to listen to a Britney Spears CD or watch a “Rock of Love” episode. He would have wiped us out in two heartbeats.