#82: THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL (1951)

THRILL SCALE 1-10

1.5

HAVE I SEEN IT BEFORE?

Never

BEST SEQUENCE

The worldwide electrical outage orchestrated by Klaatu to demonstrate his power to all of humanity

BEST LINE

"I'm impatient with stupidity. My people have learned to live without it."

ROTTEN TOMATOES SCORE

95%

ROTTEN TOMATOES CRITICS CONSENSUS

"Socially minded yet entertaining, The Day the Earth Stood Still imparts its moral of peace and understanding without didacticism."

IMDB SYNOPSIS

"An alien lands in Washington, D.C. and tells the people of Earth that they must live peacefully or be destroyed as a danger to other planets."

THOUGHTS

• More like The 90 Minutes My Life Stood Still
• Catty remarks aside, let's talk Thrill Scale. It's an entirely unscientific process. I don't have a rubric, there's no specific criteria. Really, whatever number I assign is just a way for me to quantify my gut reaction to these movies. Going into this I was uncertain how low these scores would go; this is a list of the most thrilling movies of all time, so surely there's a good chance I'd be fairly entertained by all of them. But I can definitely state that while watching The Day the Earth Stood Still I was the least entertained, the least thrilled, out of any of these movies so far
•  And I know that this is considered a stone cold classic of early sci-fi. While watching, I was trying to find some sort of justification for this and I just couldn't. It's boring and it's corny and it did nothing for me. I will acknowledge that some of these early, influential movies may have lost some of their impact because aspects have been imitated in so many movies in the years since that the original iteration may have lost some of its novelty, but even with this in my mind, I just couldn't find anything in this movie that would stick with me
• Some of the special effects, especially when it comes to Klaatu's spaceship, were fine. But Gort, the main threat to humanity in this movie, just looks like a tall guy lumbering around in grey pyjamas. I didn't find him intimidating, and I mostly just kept thinking of Sam's Halloween costume from Freaks and Geeks
• Also, all the characters kept referring to Gort as a "robut" in that old-timey way
• And Klaatu's story, of learning about this funny little species called humans, was incredibly slow going. Even the scene in which he stopped all the power across the Earth, which I thought was the most effective scene, was kind of silly. How can we show the massive impact that this would have on people around the globe? I know, how about someone who's trying to make a milkshake, but the milkshake blender won't work! Goosebumps!
• I will admit that some of the Washington DC landmarks were used effectively
• I get that this is a parable about the Cold War and nuclear weapons, and I get that Klaatu is a pretty heavy-handed Christ figure. I'm sure this was a very effective concept during the actual Cold War. These days, the movie just doesn't hold up
• We also had to deal with an annoying child actor, who got to deliver such wonderful lines as, "I like you, Mr. Carpenter! You're a real screwball!" Credit to the rest of the actors, though, at least they engaged with the film
• And so, this is officially the lowest score I've given a movie so far, and it's going to be hard to go much lower. More than even The Poseidon Adventure, another "classic" which did nothing for me at all, I wouldn't be surprised if The Day the Earth Stood Still has its defenders. And who knows, maybe I'll watch it again some day and it'll click for me. But as it stands, I doubt it, and I probably won't have the urge to watch this one ever again. But hey, check another "classic" movie off the old list

Up next: The Omen from 1976