Keanu Reeves’s easily blanked expression makes him a shoe-in for certain roles. Neo in The Matrix was one of them. Such eerie detachment is suitable for saviour situations, and such natural absence set him in good stead for the remake of The Day The Earth Stood Still, a ruthlessly unintellectual exercise in impressive special effects (you’d have to be quite hard of heart not to admit that Gort is cool, although there’s little here to surprise) with some acting from Jennifer Connelly.
Reeves plays Klaatu, an alien on a mission to rid the Earth of humans; he slowly comes to terms with his human body, and slowly figures out that, hey, people aren’t that bad after all – it’s a performance for which Reeves has received the opposite of plaudits, but this is barely fair. The <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_the_Earth_Stood_Still_(1951_film)
“>original film was a tense Cold War meditation, but had in it an intelligence that its remake wilfully shuns; a lone, heavily sign-posted scene represents the film’s limited brain processes, and wheels out John Cleese as an example of what the human race can be at its best. Klaatu hears Bach, and is amazed; he and Cleese write equations in tandem on an old-fashioned chalkboard; they talk, for a few sentences, about the world being on the brink – then the baddies come and it’s all forgotten.
The film beats an emotional path but comes up short because Klaatu’s all considered intellectualism, something that stays firmly inside his head. So all we’re left with is the special effects and Jennifer Connelly. That’s enough if you’re in the right mood, but just barely.
News hour, with Jerry Caesar 