However, it won't happen with the upcoming remake of "The Day the Earth Stood Still." This is one of my all-time favorite films, and Hollywood is getting ready to rape it.
First, they've cast Keanu Reeves as Klaatu. Are you kidding me? Is there any possible way that guy could begin to approach the poise and gravity Michael Rennie brought to that role?
Second, they've decided on a little plot change.
From the MTV Movies blog:
Fifty years later and Klaatu has a new message for humanity, but one with equally dire consequences should we choose to ignore it, Keanu Reeves, who is playing the alien in Scott Derrickson’s upcoming remake, told MTV News.
“The first one was borne out of the cold war and nuclear détente. Klaatu came and was saying cease and desist with your violence. If you can’t do it yourselves we’re going to do it. That was the film of that day,” Reeves explained. “The version I was just working on, instead of being man against man, it’s more about man against nature. My Klaatu says that if the Earth dies, you die. If you die, the earth survives. I’m a friend to the earth.”
While humanity still engages in a staggering number of international conflicts, the environmental message is one that, not only encompasses wars, and fights, and terrorism, but one that goes beyond constrictions to become a millennial message of “what we are doing and who we are as a species,” Reeves insisted. “We’re trying to reach beyond the idea of [just] environmentalism.”
Again, are you kidding me? Klaatu comes all the way to Earth to fight global warming?
From a commenter on the MTV Movies blog, with whom I wholly agree:
It’s amazing that someone is willing to take one of the first pioneering science-fiction movies and turn it, in the cheapest pornographic way, into a propaganda tool of the dumbest ideological fad of this decade. If I were a kid of the original creators, I would demand the execution of those who are humiliating the work of my parent in such a dramatic way.
Hear, hear. Sometimes the classics should be left alone.
Keanu Reeves Brings Different Message With Him In ‘Day The Earth Stood Still’
