The Two Minute Review

Added on 20 January 2009

At some point during the remake of The Day The Earth Stood Still, you start rooting for Keanu Reeves to just kill everyone. It’s not like we don’t all deserve it.

Keanu comes to Earth to save the planet from the human race. He intends giving us one last chance by speaking to the UN, but the Americans won’t let him because they want to send him to Guantanamo. He escapes, and thereafter they spend the rest of the film trying to kill him.

Naturally Keanu decides that it would be best for all the other species on Earth just to get rid of all traces of human life. Should a real pan-dimensional space-being ever turn up and encounter such a situation, the odds are strong that he’d just finish us all off. However, this is Hollywood. Keanu changes his mind because he meets John Cleese, listens to Bach, and then watches Jennifer Connelly cry and hug the annoying kid.

There’s nowt like being lectured on humanity and environmentalism by the money-clutching, cynical, back-stabbing behemoth of the American film industry. It’s a fitting end to an atrocious piece of mince. It’s amazing that they managed to stop short of having the two principals kiss.

In reality, if an all-powerful space-being came to Earth and gave the human race twenty years to sort itself out or die, do you think the governments and big business of the world would spend twenty years trying to sort itself out....or d’you think it would spend twenty futile years trying to improve its weapons, so that they could try to kick the all-powerful space-being’s alien butt for him when he came back?

And we all know the answer to that.