Results tagged “THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL” from Coventry Telegraph - The Geek Files

AFTER seeing several less-than-glowing reviews for Fox's remake of The Day The Earth Stood Still, I really wasn't sure what to expect from this film.

In fact, I was pleasantly surprised by much of the movie, which has topped the UK box office in the first week.

It's not a brilliant blockbuster but it's not a terrible film by any means. What it does is modernise the ideas in the original, with varying success.

THE CO-CHAIRMAN of 20th Century Fox has admitted the studio has had a poor summer with a string of film releases that "weren't good enough."

It's been pretty obvious to most film fans that Fox has had a terrible season. Meet Dave, The Happening, X-Files: I Want to Believe, Babylon AD, Mirrors and Space Chimps were among the releases that bombed at the box office.

Fox's co-chairman and CEO Tom Rothman said that the start of the year had gone well but had led into an 'off summer.' But he added the studio felt The Happening had ultimately performed very well because it had been bolstered by its $100million overseas takings.

Rothman (pictured) told IESB: "The summer was a disappointment and there's no two ways about that. Ultimately, the movies weren't good enough and we had made the decision because of the strike and other things that we were not going to rush certain movies.

"We took an extra year on Wolverine, for example, when originally we had hoped to have that for the second half of this summer. Same with The Day the Earth Stood Still. We took a decision to give [these] movies the proper time they needed.

"So, we didn't actually lose a lot of money but, having had nine summers in a row that have been top notch, we had an off summer. The good news is that from Max Payne through all of next year through Avatar we are absolutely loaded. So, we're in as strong a position going forward. The coming year is going to be very strong for us."

HAVE your first encounter with Fox's new sci-fi remake with this new trailer for The Day The Earth Stood Still, due for release on December 12 this year.

It's a reworking of the 1951 classic in which a humanoid alien called Klaatu (Michael Rennie) steps out of a flying saucer that lands in Washington, along with a robot called Gort. Klaatu attempts to gather the world's leaders to warn them that other planets are concerned for their safety because of Earth's development of nuclear weapons. To show he means business, Klaatu stops all electric power on Earth.

The movie was made after the end of the Second World War (and the start of the cold war as the Soviet Union became a new threat) and as man developed the H-bomb and prepared for his first steps into space.

Directed by Scott Derrickson (Hellraiser: Inferno, The Exorcism of Emily Rose), the remake stars Keanu Reeves as Klaatu and Jennifer Connelly as Helen Benson, a scientist assigned by the government to investigate the alien. The original themes have been replaced with modern environmental concerns. There's also an updated version of the robot Gort.

Reeves told MTV: "The first one was borne out of the cold war and nuclear détente. Klaatu came and was saying cease and desist with your violence. If you can't do it yourselves we're going to do it. That was the film of that day. The version I was just working on, instead of being man against man, it's more about man against nature. My Klaatu says that if the Earth dies, you die. If you die, the earth survives. I'm a friend to the earth."