Shock Corridor

A comparison of The Day the Earth Stood Still (Robert Wise, 1951) and…ehh…well – The Day the Earth Stood Still but this one was by Scott Derrickson in 2008 Let’s just get this out of the way at the outset, if you read my first post then you’ll know that I have a certain affection for the 1951 original and so may be prone to more than a touch of bias. Couple that with the fact that the contemporary version decided that Keanu Reeves would make a sensible choice for the lead role of Klaatu and we should all be packing up now and going home. But since we are probably all already home, please believe me when I say that I shall endeavour to be objective and choke the festering bile back as it rises and taking pleasure in the fact that at least it wasn’t Tom Cruise. To aid my objectivity I’ve decided not to focus on film form, or actor’s performance, or, at least directly, the plot, but instead hone in on one particular element – biblical references, and draw contextual pol...

The next post will be a comparison of the original 1951 film The Day the Earth Stood Still by Robert Wise and the 2008 remake by Scott Derrickson. In the meantime here's a little something to tide you over. J

        From the minute Gort, a ten-foot tall robot, walked down the runway from his spaceship, I was mesmerised. When you are six staying up late is exciting enough, but when you’re six - staying up late - waiting for your dad to come home - during a ferocious thunderstorm, you really have to keep an emergency set of clean underwear beside you. But this is exactly what I found myself doing. Sitting in the dark, which was only interrupted by the crackling coal fire, the flickering black and white portable TV and the occasional flash of lightning, I flicked through all 3 available channels and found an old movie called The Day The Earth Stood Still . For those that don’t know, the film’s plot revolves around the reasonable enough premise that an alien comes to earth, sent by a federation of planets, in an attempt to convince mankind that they are making a huge mistake by testing nuclear weapons. The spaceship lands in Washington D.C., fair enough...