The Day The Earth Had To Sit Through

I went to the movies yesterday. I asked a friend to come along because I knew that it wasn't going to be pretty. We went to see "The Day The Earth Stood Still." I was fairly certain that the casting of Keanu Reeves as Klaatu would be enough to assure my displeasure, since I had already had my own version in mind for several years, and mine starred David "The Man Who Fell To Earth" Bowie. I confess that I paid for my ticket with the understanding that I would be disappointed.
In my version, Klaatu descends from the stars on Super Bowl Sunday. Mine was set in the days shortly after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. How would the world react to a visitor from another planet at such a xenophobic time in history? I saw this as a mirror of the red scare that ran through Robert Wise's 1951 original. What would happen, my pitch went, if the world had to stop and consider a reality in which we were all suspects. Showing up just before kickoff in front of millions of viewers to announce that he had come in peace might not be enough to instill trust and hope in a frightened and jaded population.
To be honest, I hadn't decided if I wanted Klaatu to be completely sincere in his motives. I wanted to keep open the possibility that he had come to trick us into laying down our weapons just long enough to have his big silver robot take over without a fight. None of that ambivalence exists in Keanu's version. He has come to save the Earth from mankind. The rest of the film plays out like a sci-fi version of "An Inconvenient Truth" including product placement by such Earth-friendly corporations as Microsoft and McDonald's. The cast seemed to be under strict direction not to out-emote Mister Reeves. In the end, the big silver robot gets his name from a military acronym and then turns into a cloud of metallic locusts out to chew up the man-made mess we created before returning the carefully collected space arks full of the animals to return the planet back to the way it was meant to be: without us. But Keatu discovers what it means to be human, which apparently includes feeling really sorry about all the mess he made of Jennifer Connelly's home life. An intergalactic "my bad." Then he packs up his great big old glowing sphere of swirling lights, because a flying saucer would have been much too cliche, and leaves Central Park and the rest of Manhattan and the eastern seaboard a colossal wreck strewn with millions of dead metal bugs. There was no reckoning, we just had to promise to get our act together and stop littering. Right after we clean up New York City. Again.
Part of the reason that I abandoned my screenplay back in the early days of our new millennium was that I didn't think that I could do justice to the sentiments expressed in Edmund North's original: "It is no concern of ours how you run your own planet, but if you threaten to extend your violence, this Earth of yours will be reduced to a burned-out cinder. Your choice is simple: join us and live in peace, or pursue your present course and face obliteration. We shall be waiting for your answer. The decision rests with you." It's been said as well as it can be.
Meanwhile, "The Man Who Fell To Earth" has already had a second shot as a TV-movie, and the friendly folks at Warner Brothers has yet another remake in pre-production. I won't be writing that either. But I might just drag a friend along to see it.