The Days the Earth Stood Still: 1951 and 2008

The 2008 remake of The Day The Earth Stood Still (a 1951 masterpiece) was not as terrible as I imagined it would be, but it is a pale shadow of its predecessor.

It's interesting to note that the newer version credits the Edmund H. North screenplay as a source, whereas the 1951 film is based in part upon Harry Bates' short story "Farewell to the Master." (full text at http://thenostalgialeague.com/olmag/bates-farewell-to-the-master.html ). North elegantly riffed on the original and made it a strong and affecting cautionary meditation on the cost of war and violence. Sad to say, despite its high-tech CG effects, and more than a few "moments," the 2009 update never achieves the power of North's work.

Perhaps if I hadn't seen the original so many times, I would have spent less viewing time comparing the two, but we are what we are, and I couldn't help but do that. There's no question that David Scarpa managed to re-frame North's scenario in terms of the modern American military, modern technology and a sketchy, not terribly offensive version of the United States goverment. In 1951, for example, Klaatu simply walks out of the hospital where he is being kept under what seems today like minimal security. It was as though the average citizen would have simply honored the uniform and side-arms and not bothered to try to escape. Not so with the new Klaatu. He is kept under high-tech, computer controlled lock and key which requires that he use his extraterrestrial powers to jam video and audio surveillance systems, deafen and knock out myriad layers of security guards, pick electronic locks on the fly and generally avoid all sorts and kinds of impossible to defeat systems. All of this is plausible and rather clever and exciting, but, in the end it misses the point or dilutes it so badly that in the end it's just a lot of sound and fury.

It's awfully hard to put my finger on what's not right about the Scarpa retelling, but I think it has to do with the aforementioned "average citizen." It had always struck me that the original had the look and feel of a newsreel, and Robert Wise indeed confirmed that to me: he'd intended the film to play like what we would now call a "documentary." It had a simple photographic and editorial style that echoed what the average moviegoer would have seen each week in the black and white newsreels of the day including commentary by actual radio announcers. (Prior to the 24/7 coverage of the every twitch and flatulent sound of every world leader on CNN and the Web, each of the major film studios, but especially Fox and Universal, turned out a 10-12 minute "newsreel" that summed up the major breaking stories of the day with on-the-scene movie footage that augmented what people read in the newspaper or heard on the radio. There are, in fact, wonderful moments in the 1951 DESS with the rooming house boarders sitting around the breakfast table earnestly reading the Washington DC newspaper in order to find out what was going on in the world).

North tells his story through the reactions of these average folks to extraordinary events simply and sincerely. The Scarpa script instead uses the literal internet to show what people world wide are experiencing, but -- although authentic and visually clever -- it lacks emotional and human connection. That, indeed, may be one of the tragic by-products of the web itself: many of us (and apparently the current screenwriter) have lost touch with genuine face-t0-face human communication. Instant messaging and YouTube and blogs will never replace handshakes, conversations, deep meaningful eyeball to eyeball glances or real hugs and kisses. The 2008 film reproduces the cold, impersonal, arms-length modern world only too, too well.

Perhaps 1951 was a simpler more innocent world. I doubt that really, but the realities of military life, inter-continental communication and transport, and technology were certainly less sophisticated, varied and complicated than they are today. To be true to 2008, one must show it as it is.

The original Gort was about 7 feet tall, the new Gort is 70 or 700 feet tall (I don't really know how tall he is, but he's very, very tall). Yet, the itsy bitsy original Gort is mighty scary and ominous and the big tall Gort just looks like yet another slick Video Game robot. We have little emotional connection to this character. In fact, Scarpa (or someone) decided that G.O.R.T. was an acronym instead of a name. Gort like his namesake Gnut in the Bates story was a real character, not a throwaway piece of electronics. The audience cared about what he did, what he might be thinking, what he could do: The signature 1951 dialogue "Gort, Klatuu barada nicto" was absolutely all about Gort as a character, not Gort as an abstract idea or a clever visual effect.

By compressing the drama down to a basically three character story (Klaatu, Helen, and her son Jacob), Scarpa acheives a certain economy that allows lots more time to show nifty CG effects. But it loses the relationship to "every man," to the down to earth man on the street so lovingly set out in North's screenplay and Wise's incisive casting. The 1951 film is all the more terrifying, suspenseful, funny and heart-breaking for the foibles of people that, aside from the sort of clothes they wear and minor affectations of speech, we would recognize as people we know today. I just can't help thinking (perhaps unfairly given the homogenization imposed on so many scripts by studios) that Mr. Scarpa spends far too much time on Facebook and MSN Chat and far too little time sitting and talking to people or getting drunk in some low-life bar where he could hear directly about the petty, debilitating pain of the underprivileged. The montages of the Robert Wise film showing peasants and rich people alike all over the world paralyzed and terrified by the events of the story are eerie and affecting even today. There is no similar moment in director Scott Derrickson's (or the studio editor's) take on all this. While it moves along okay, I could have cared less.

And then there is Bernard Herrmann's score. It's a cliche to praise it as one of the greatest motion picture scores ever composed, but it is true. No offense to Tyler Bates who does good work as a composer. It's just that Herrmann was one of a kind: we will not see his like again. And his score for The Day the Earth Stood Still is one of a kind as well: there will be no other that achieves what this score achieves. It is one with the movie just as Herrmann's score for Psycho is married to that story as well. Herrmann's genius, perhaps, was in the way that his music became an active character in the story telling. Unlike the symphonic, operatic, program music style of Korngold and Rosza which wrapped the story in warm, Wagnerian layers of sugary emotion, Herrmann's music shed all the calories and acted both in counterpoint and to create information that didn't exist in the movie itself. Watch, for example, just the opening title sequence of DESS first without the sound and then with it, and you'll immediately understand what's added: it's rhythm, suspense, mystery, emotion, but all in a subtle and unexpected way with startling instrumentations and sounds that were otherwise non-existent in mainstream music of his day. YouTube Video

I'm not entirely sure what the message of the newer film is. I took it to be saying that humans were polluting their world uncontrollably (although some reviewers I've perused seem to be obsessed with the notion that Klaatu is destroying the world because humans have caused global warming which, they go on to say isn't real anyway as every Fox News Channel watching viewer would already know) and that this was not good form for sentient beings. North, on the other hand, was all about human violence and the threat of carrying wars, idiosyncratic destruction, and nuclear weapons into space where it would harm other more advanced, peaceful civilizations.

Sadly, North's message is as true today as it was 60 years ago: the behavior of Iran in 2010 is identical to the sort of thing North warns us about in 1951. The average citizen of this or any other country was well aware of atomic weapons in 1951: they were frightened by them in a way that perhaps modern citizens -- accustomed as they are to remote-controlled drone weapons that zip around like so many video-game toys -- may no longer be. The every day reality of nuclear annihilation has been pushed from our minds by information overload.

This brings me back to the risky notion that 1951 was a "simpler time." I reject that. No historic time was ever simple. But at any moment in history certain ideas and events stand out in more relief. Polio was not cured in 1951 and atomic bombs and spies lurked in every shadow. The Robert Wise/Edmund North/Bernard Herrmann Day the Earth Stood Still had all of those terrifying shadows faithfully reproduced. When I saw it as a small child, it frightened me in an indelible and, to its credit, constructive way: I never forgot the film and became (perhaps shamefully) a wee bit obsessed with its craftsmanship and message. It will be a long time before I think I'll be moved to dig out the 2008 version to watch it again, but having just watched a few clips from the original on YouTube in the last hours, I can truthfully say that I can't wait to watch the whole thing yet again. It pulls me in everytime.

I've been exploring, in other essays, some sort of practical definition for "masterpiece" in the context of motion pictures. A troublesome, slippery word. But one quality that jumps out at me is the magnetic pull of the great films. You can turn them on, tune in to the middle of them, hear them from the next room, and before you know it, you have stopped washing the dishes or typing in your blog or Instant Messaging, and you find yourself sitting absolutely still and watching the whole movie yet again. You just can't help it. Excuse me, but I want to see what happens to Klaatu...