Klaatu muy bueno!............
Posted on 12/15/2008 6:10:04 AM PST by pabianice
Quick. Name three great films which, when remade, topped the original. OK, two. One. Getting the picture?
When Fox reported that it was remaking what is probably the seminal sci fi classic of the 1950s -- The Day the Earth Stood Still -- there was much interest. The original was a taught, tight, gripping story of a possible end to the world. Filmed in just a few weeks in 1951, when CGI was non-existant, the face-paced script and first-rate actors made it one for the ages. Alas, Fox has taken the title and made a mess of the story by turning it into an Al Gore tirade about "global warming," perhaps the greatest hoax ever perpetuated.
Read the reviews for yourself. Friends who have seen this mess of a movie warn not to waste your money. They say it is worse than you'd expect, a huge, sprawling, paralyzingly slow and stupid story filled with CGI eye candy. The early reports of a sort of "1984" version of film crews not being allowed to use motor vehicles or non-disposable items "in order to keep in harmony with the film's theme" were, it seems, not just wild fantasies. The same lobotomized worship at the Shrine of the Holy Recycler seems to have bled-over into the film's script.
At a reported production cost of $160 million, plus an additional $100 million in domestic marketing, this reported stink bomb is gonna have to do big overseas, where the Mother Lode of Gorites live in perpetual fear of "global warming."
Klaatu barata macaca!
The crux of the original was cautioning the dangers of NUCLEAR PROLIFERATION. Guess that has been changed.
I love this one:
The Day The Earth Stood Stupid, 13 December 2008
1/10
Author: JoeWho from United States
*** This comment may contain spoilers ***
Ouch! $11 times 2 wasted on IMAX. There are so many plot holes in this film I don’t know where to begin.
1. A UFO is rushing towards NYC. Prediction is a cataclysmic collision. They assemble a team of scientists and rush them right to ground zero. Are you kidding? Never happen.
2, The UFO “lands” and the first people out are the scientists. Even ahead of the military. One walks right up to shake hands with the alien. Please! Never happen.
3.Klaatu is brought for interrogation. They bring him into a room with a lone interrogator and leave. Are you kidding? No guards in the room? Never happen.
4. The military decides to enclose GORT in giant steel panels. They built these in a matter of hours? How? Where?
5. After enclosing him, he is lowered into some underground laboratory that appears custom-made for him. Where did that come from? How did they get him there?
6. They break a diamond drill on GORT and say it will take 24 hours to fix. The boss barks “Fix it now”!. They send in a poor schlub who promptly screws on a new drill bit. Then the sucker dies.
7. Klaatu meets with another of his kind who has lived among us for 70 years and apparently become quite fond of us. Why didn’t he convince the rest of the aliens not to destroy humanity? He came to the same conclusion that Klaatu eventually reaches.
8. The “swarm” is destroying everything man-made in its path. We see it destroy Giants Stadium in a matter of seconds. Then it is in Central Park. Why aren’t all the buildings in Manhattan falling down? Klaatu hasn’t done anything to stop them up to this point.
Oh—I could go on and on. Then there are all of the plot clichés; Good scientist resists evil government. Frustrated step-mom/ disconnected stepson find redemption through love of dead father/husband. Boo hoo hoo. Stupid general fires all his big guns at indestructible alien. You know what’s going to happen. Yup, general gets destroyed/vaporized/eaten. Oh, fugitive scientist, alien, and kid go to see kindly old professor. They always do that. And the authorities always show up there. This movie stinks on ice. I’m not a huge fan of the original but at least that had a story and decent acting.
Wow! Someone got screwed on this one!
I saw it over the weekend, and it was a stinker as far as the story goes, but I'll go to a movie and enjoy it just for the special effects. I remember thinking about 2/3 through that the special effects weren't that special and that they must have made this movie on the cheap.
Everybody should read the source of DTESS, “Farewell to the Master” by Harry Bates.
This story was warped into an anti-nuke propaganda film, and warped again into a green propaganda film.
Read the short story and imagine Hollywood doing it “straight”!
The first movie was bad enough, I have no desire to see the “remake”.
What’s next, Forbidden Planet with Lindsay Lohan and Johnny Depp?
It used to be that in these sort of movies the basic them was ,”They attacked us, but we survived”. With this one, and I assume others following it, the theme is, “They attacked us. We had it coming”.
When the studios bankrupt themselves by making movies people don’t want to watch, are they going to be asking for a bail-out as well?
Klaatu muy bueno!............
I'm surprised NAMBLA didn't have some input into the remake.
Calling denizens of interplanetary craft...I have that vinyl!
You’ve got some typos in your article. It’s “taut” and “fast-paced”.
Someone on my board wrote this was the worst film he has ever suffered through.
I wish they wouldn’t keep trying to remake the great old classics of Hollywood. They became classics for a REASON. Mess with the essential elements of that classic and it no longer remains a classic.
What Hollywood should do is strike new prints of these old classics and bring them to the big screen. I’ll bet they’d make a ton of money, with little expenditure. People would love to see these old classics on a big screen like they were seen originally, 40, 50, 60 years ago, instead of just on a 42 inch tv screen.
So do I! 1977..................
I would like to see "Casablanca" remade and directed by Tim Burton.
/s
total garbage
I saw it and there was NOT ONE SINGLE SENTENCE related to global warming in the dialogue
I agree with all of your assessments. On top of it, must Will Smith (or now his kid) be in every movie made? Talk about over-exposure! Enough already. And don’t forget the cliche of having the one child in the story be black- even though his only remaining parent/step-parent is lily white so you keep wondering where he came from. I know she’s the step-parent, but it is a little weird at first. How PC.
They tried that with Psycho (using the same script and camera shots), and it didn't work either. Who actually "green-lights" these ideas?
Mark
It’s a wonder they didn’t call the robot AlGort!..................
Different times. In 1951, there may have been bad guys around but walking around Washington, DC in the daytime wasn’t a threat to your life the way it is now. I used to go to the Smithsonian by myself, on the bus, on Sunday from up near Glebe Rd to Constitution Ave. Great way to spend a Sunday.
“The crux of the original was cautioning the dangers of NUCLEAR PROLIFERATION. Guess that has been changed.”
While flipping channels YESTERDAY, I saw a few seconds of a “making of..” thing about this. One of the ‘makers’ said something to the fact that:
“the darn original was made over 50 years ago -when nuclear war was THE issue... We needed to use a ‘contemporary’ crisis that people can relate to...”
Well, the Alice in Wonderland by Marylyn Manson with Lily Cole as Alice looks interesting, but only in a “already over the edge” way. And Lily is pretty.
How about Casablanca by David Lynch with Dennis Hopper and Madonna?
Just what IS THE PLOT of this new movie? Stop the Global Warming or we’ll destroy you?................
Heh,heh Not to worry, I don't pay a lot to view hollywood movies anyway. I might watch it someday, but it will have to go into rotation with "Attack of the Killer Tomatoes", "Robot meets Aztec Mummy", "Godzilla" (and all of the spin-offs), etc., etc.
Designer usually finds these movies in the $1 bin at the local discount store.
I'm guessing this one will be there very soon.
.
As a child-pre teen, I used to go to the museums in Chicago,on the 'L',by myself,,,Natural History, Science, Aquarium,Planetarium,,Great experiences I wish I had been able to provide my own kids, but left Chicago for Missouri,,,,
Me too. Grew up on LI and we had rabbit ears on our b/w TVs and would watch stations like WPIX and WOR in NYC, which would show old movies regularly, you could actually write to CBS in NY and request a film and they would honor it by showing it on the Late Show. In fact they would actually WRITE ME BACK A LETTER and say “Your movie is scheduled for ...”
It was a different world!
6 months to PPV and DVD release is the usual schedule. Sooner if it was a bomb. We usually buy the pre-viewed DVD from Blockbuster at 3 for $20............
A simple plot......So a being of some sort appears, and boasts of his superiority. He does have some advanced technology....But the only thing the being has is some technology that we did not yet have. Does that make him superior in any moral sense? Of course not.
Well, HE certainly thinks so.
Then he goes on a lengthy rant of how his superior being race will destroy our race if we do not put down the weaponry that he claims is ok to use against us, simply because we have it and HE and HIS race do not trust us to manage ours.
What a crock. This movie was nothing more than one group seeing itself superior, and therefore morally impregnated to such an extent that it threatened to kill whole other societies.
Where is the questioning of the morality his his own self-sanctiioned genocide?
Rennie's character was a psychopathic killer looking for a reason to let loose his morally superior weapons.
Nothing more than a stylized Hitler/Khan/Pol Pot
Where is the logical morality of all that?
A bit like Invasion of The Body Snatchers... no one has ever gotten it right. They lard the story up with all kinds of warnings against whatever evil the left is seeing at that moment then they end it by having the evil win out. For the left it’s scarier if the evil can not be stopped.
No one ever mentions that in the original Jack Vance novel the humans win and drive off the aliens just by resisting them.
Ask and ye shall receive (well, maybe not the Lohan and Depp part):
http://www.aintitcool.com/node/14383
Excerpt:
Dreamworks seeking screenwriters for FORBIDDEN PLANET remake Hey folks, Harry here... FORBIDDEN PLANET is a project that's been in the hell of development for what seems like ages. One of the problems they've had is that everytime they develop it, they keep running back into the original, which is of course genius.
Keanu Barada Nikto
A $31 Million opening weekend doesn’t bode well for a film with $260 into it already.
Looks like this is another “Day After Tommorrow” bomb.
Unfortunately, I gave my money at the box office. Fortunately, it was at matinee pricing. The movie plot was horrendously didactic. Worse than that, Will Smith’s son was a superfluous character....and an overly annoying one, at that.
Stop destroying your planet or we’re going to destroy your planet.
Wouldn’t lending some of their advanced technology to prevent the destruction be a win-win for everyone? Are aliens that stupid? No, it’s Hollywood.
I still throw-up in my mouth a little when I remember seeing the awful 2006 remake of “The Flight of the Phoenix.”
Yup. Sure beats paying full boat at the theaters!
Swell. Now stories are online. How does the author’s estate get its royalties?
I walked to and from grade school every day. Three mile round trip. None of us were ever in danger. Sigh.
1. The Ten Commandments (1956 version better then 1923 version)
2. King Kong (2005 version better than 1933 version, and wayyyy better than 1970s version)
3. You've Got Mail (1998 version better than 1940 'The Shop Around the Corner')
It wasn't easy coming up with three
I've seen the previews and I wrote down a prediciton based on what I saw. So far this thread has me right on every prediciton hahahah.
These remakes seem to always fall short.
Recenlty War of the Worlds was probably the best of any remake I've seen in awhile (which is not saying much) but the one huge glaring plot hole early on just had me annoyed through the whole dang movie.
Supposedly an advance civilization prepositioned war machines hundreds of thousands of years prior to their invasion.
Why?
That fact (revealed when the reporter tells Tom Cruise about it at the plane crash scene) just made me want grab Spielberg by the neck and throttle him good!
What was a decent movie visually and plenty of tension and action just was ruined for me by sitting there thinking the whole time about why ALiens would do such a stupid thing.
Absolutely disagree with you on all three. The originals there all have heart and soul, the remakes are vapid and long-winded in all cases.
Even the silent Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ (1925) is better than the later William Wyler remake; even the chariot race is more suspenseful and better filmed. Real love went into those old films - now everything looks so fake with CGI. Back then you had real human extras - now they use computers to make fake people for crowd scenes to save themselves money - and it shows.
I’m still trying to figure out the movie “The Lost World,” the sequel to Jurassic Park.
How did Jeff Goldblum have a dark-skinned black daughter,
when he’s a white guy? And why would he allow her on the island with dangerous, man-eating dinosaurs running amuck?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.