Aphabetical movie - The Day the Earth Stood Still
The Day the Earth Stood Still is viewed, along with Metropolis, Forbidden Planet, 2001 and Star Wars as one of the most iconic classic science fiction films. When I watched it for the first time, I could see echoes of other films like E.T and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Even The Terminator.
While most science fiction films of the era were dealing with the cold war and nuclear threats, this film did it in a way that feels completely different. Instead of monsters created out of our scientific hubris, the monsters were the humans.
Given almost every opportunity to behave in a civil fashion and clearly outgunned, the humans in this film are not the heroic freedom fighters of War of the Worlds. They are instead paranoid, over confident and blind to the realities of the situation.
In a genre where militarism seems to frequently be the ideal, this film reveres science. The people to whom Klaatu finally speaks are scientists of the world because the world leaders were too petty to recognize that something as big as the confirmation of extraterrestrial intelligence was far more important than political divisions.
I'm not sure that the point of this film is that science is good and militarism is bad. Rather, the film took the point of view that we as a species were not capable of rising above our own petty infighting when something really important happened.
We've been raised to believe that humans are the superior species on our planet. This film uses that conceit - that we are at the top of the food chain - and shows how irrational we become as a result. On the one hand, you have the egotism that presumes you could keep an alien locked up if he did not wish to be and on the other, the panic reaction that happens as people realize the alien might be somewhere nearby.
To me, the film feels like a response to many other alien visitor movies of the era because what it is saying is "really - why would an alien life form want to come here?"
In the end, Klaatu's message is pretty clear: you are a pretty messed up species and until you get your house in order, stay out of ours.
The human race is not inherently evil. It is, however, inherently selfish. This film shows that selfishness and asks how it would look to someone from another planet.
The answer, it would seem, is not too good.
OK, next up is Kenneth Branaugh's attempt to do Hitchcock in Dead Again!