THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL (1951, what do you mean, which version?)
Still one of the early classics, still loaded with terrific visuals, THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL works on several levels at the same time. It's a lecture about the evils of the Cold War and a not-too-subtle religious allegory, working both ends without its smooth briskness getting bogged down. Most of the cast is adequate at best, but Michael Rennie as the dignified, stern Klaatu is perfect in the role; Patricia Neal is excellent as the woman whose son befriends the visitor, and Sam Jaffe is as always a delight. Gort is in a class by himself; even if the rest of
the movie had been a boring dud, his scenes still have an air of impending doom that would make the film worth sitting through. (The ominous music with heavy use of the unearthly-sounding theremin is a big help.)
If you haven't seen the movie (and you should), a human-looking alien named Klaatu and his imposing robot Gort land their flying saucer in Washington DC. Klaatu is immediately wounded by an overwrought soldier, declares he has come to deliver a message to the human race, and then goes undercover for a while to observe us as one of us. (He takes the name Mr Carpenter, kind of a hint). To get our attention, he arranges for all electrical machinery to shut down worldwide for a half hour (thus the title). After that he is betrayed, shot dead while running from the
authorities and returns to life - not rising from the tomb on the third day, but just resuscitated medically by Gort. Not bearing too much of a grudge, he simply makes a stern speech to an assembly of scientists that we on Earth had better watch our step or we'll be in serious trouble. Then he flies away, no doubt still annoyed at having been shot twice by these Earthmen.
The movie has a lot of moderately thought-provoking stuff about how international politics and personal interactions are based on irrational fears and prejudices, how violence stems from ignorance, and so forth. As usual, there's a good amount of human-bashing, with only a few likeable citizens and Lincoln's Inaugural Address standing up for us. I'm going to skip that heavy subtext and ramble with my usual
speculations.
One funny thing is that I had it in my head (from watching this flick years ago) that Klaatu was just another Menace From Space. He came here to warn us to get in line and threatened to impose his system on us of rule by unstoppable robot watchmen. It's really not like that, Klaatu comes right out and says that his people don't care what we do to each other. He's not offering to lead us into a Golden Age of advancedtechnology and freedom from want. No, the problem is that we Earthlings were developing atomic bombs and rockets at the same time, a combination
potentially threatening to the other planets. So his mission was to just read the riot act. Any attempt to explore outer space with armed ships would be met with finality ("This Earth of yours would be reduced to a burnt-out cinder.")
I dunno.... Klaatu's people were over-reacting, if you want my honest opinion. This was 1951, after all. We were still eighteen years from managing to haul a handful of men to the Moon for a few days. Thirty years after that, we still haven't gotten any further, much less assaulted Mars or Venus with atomic bomb-flinging battleships. In fact, human nature being as pugnacious and contrary as it is, Klaatu's intimidating actions might have instead spurred humanity to leap into
full-scale militarization of space travel. "Those aliens can't push us around," would be the rallying cry.)
And I still have major reservations about the way the other planets run their own lives. They have built a race of robots, of which Gort seems to be a typical specimen, and have handed over all authority to them. In case of any acts of aggression, the robots swing into action and vaporize the guilty parties. No pleas, no extenuating circumstances. My reaction was "Oh come ON." I don't believe for a second that the robots could be infallible or incorruptible.
Anything programmed can be hacked, and if the Gort Troopers could be constructed to follow certain guidelines, then some genius certainly could find a way to alter those protocols and have an army of planet-melting unkillable soldiers ready for a coup. Or failing that, how about a simple systems crash? I'd hate to see Gort's visor rise to show the Blue Screen of Death from Windows. Klaatu says his people do
not claim to achieved perfection "But we have a system, and it works." Sorry, I don't buy it.
For that matter, Klaatu tells the scientists that the "absolute authority" given the robots "cannot be revoked." And yet... at the beginning of the movie, when Klaatu has been shot in the shoulder, Gort makes his impressive appearance in the doorway of the saucer and promptly starts melting guns, tanks and artillery with his visor beam. He doesn't go on to start slaughtering the crowd, presumably because Klaatu hadn't been killed. (Later, when his partner is in fact shot
dead, Gort somehow knows about it and immediately disintegrates two soldiers approaching him.) Anyway, Klaatu says "Gort! Deklato prosko!" and the robot obligingly lowers his visor and simmers down. How this jibes with the bit about the robots having absolute authority and not being subject to recall is hard to say. Maybe Klaatu was laying it on a bit thick for his audience and there were ways for authorized individuals to keep the robots from incinerating the populace. (This
does give new meaning to "our safe word.")
I certainly admire Gort's ability to stiffly lumber through downtown city streets (he makes Kharis the Mummy look nimble), retrieve Klaatu's body from a jail cell and carry it back to the saucer. Even at night and with the streets deserted, an eight foot shiny robot would not expected to show much stealth. Personally, I suspect Gort had his visor up the whole time and simply vaporized anyone who was unfortunate enough to spot him. I'd bet Washington DC had twenty missing person reports the next day. (Gort's simple and elegant design deserves an essay in itself, but note here that he does not have hinges or knight's armor construction; his elbows and knees flex slightly, as if he were made of the liquid metal popularized decades later by the Terminator.)
THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL was based on a 1940 pulp story by Harry Bates, "Farewell To the Master." There the big twist is that Gnut (a humanoid creation with defined muscles and green skin) wasn't Klaatu's mechanical servant but in fact was the dominant partner himself. This was dropped from the movie but odd traces of it still remain. Gort acts on his own volition quite a bit, and I still have a sneaking suspicion that maybe Klaatu was just being employed by the super-robot race (who were in fact in charge) to interact with the Earthlings because he happened to look like them.
Dir: Robert Wise