The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951)
This post is part of my ongoing project to watch my science fiction blindspots. You can find my list of upcoming movies for this project here.
I love watching old science fiction. I love seeing the seeds of tropes I’ve always taken for granted, slowed down to a deliberate pace because there’s no need to rush through them yet. I love getting to know the basics, and I love being able to compare older works to see how far we’ve pushed the genre. I love being surprised by old movies, and I love seeing how they predict the shape of things to come, and how they demonstrate the ways that we were blind to faults that scream so loudly now, and how they tell the truth about the flaws humanity has always carried.
I was looking for a brief black and white movie about an alien scored by theremins. I got it. I was expecting to see a screaming woman carried by a giant robot onto a flying saucer surrounded by tanks and guns. I got that too. I was expecting a semi-religious story, complete with a message of peace and resurrection, and I wasn’t disappointed.
But I was surprised. The Day the Earth Stood Still gets a few key details just right: it grounds the story in the small interpersonal dramas of strangers meeting and growing jealous and getting caught up in love. The characters are sketches, but they’re no less believable: petty, open, trusting, suspicious. The character who cut me to the quick was so full of self-importance that he couldn’t imagine anyone else’s misfortune outweighing his own opportunities for advancement. He sells out another person, just for the chance at power, and he justifies his decision to his disappointed fiancee by telling her about how she’ll feel differently when she sees his face in the newspapers the next morning. He is unable to think outside his own head—a horror more potent than the giant robot threatening to evaporate the soldiers guarding it nearby.
As a message movie, The Day the Earth Stood Still is heavy-handed; it’s difficult to write aliens who are superior to the human race without making them come across as assholes. Klaatu is a bit of a jerk, but he works as a character, partly because Michael Rennie’s angular face looks so otherworldly, and partly because the movie plays up the horror of an alien delivering an ultimatum to the entire human race. Klaatu is at his best when he is slightly scary, even when we know his intentions are good.
And despite his good intentions, the ultimatum he delivers tastes sour: a threat of violence as a way to deter violence is no real freedom at all. The Day the Earth Stood Still feels prophetic, not because it predicts the way we’d greet an alien visitor with any accuracy, but because it is so blind to the flaws in our own society, even as it points out their symptoms. We’re violent, and we’re distrustful, and we mess up all the time. Klaatu’s solution is to threaten violence with annihilation: those who live by the gun will die by the death ray, cut down by an interstellar police force. When violence can only be met with violence, can there be any real peace?
