The day the earth stood still themes7/20/2023 ![]() (In fact, he is not unakin to Mr Spock in tv’s Star Trek (1966-9) over a decade later). It is, for example, the only film up until The World, The Flesh and the Devil (1958) to show African-American faces, even if they are only non-speaking roles in the background of the crowds, which says some unique things about how America (which equated itself with the whole world in these films) viewed itself.įurthermore, Klaatu, played with ramrod saintliness by Michael Rennie, is seen as an avatar of transcendental rationalism and reason. There are many aspects to it that no other 50s science-fiction film touched. The Day the Earth Stood Still is one of the few positive and hopeful films of the 1950s. The robot Gort (Lock Martin) stands guard outside the saucer Certainly, it is easy to take issues with the film’s politics and apparent hypocrisy of a superior race issuing us with orders to disarm or else they will destroy us, and many have (although it is not a great deal different to many of the anti-nuclear pronouncements made to countries like Iran and North Korea by the US in the present day, while themselves holding the biggest nuclear stockpile in the world). Moreover, it directly issues a warning to humanity that it MUST disarm or else we will be destroyed. Unlike any other film of that era though, The Day the Earth Stood Still challenges humanity to think beyond the small paranoid confines of nationalistic war-mongering and in terms of world-scale. Almost every film of the 1950s cowers in the shadow of the threat of The Bomb – they mask and symbolise it as revived dinosaurs and giant bugs and offers ludicrous assurances that the forces of law and order would always be there to put such threats down. Which is of course exactly what the generation of the 1950s saw The Bomb that had been unleashed only six years earlier as being. This is the entire brunt of The Day the Earth Stood Still – that the world is facing a threat that is larger than any earthbound terrestrial squabbles. This was a signal that humanity was facing a quantum new threat, something that was bigger and more devastating than all meagre human military power. The frisson such a scene had for audiences was in seeing Earth’s military might humbled and its weaponry melted to a glowing lump in a matter of seconds. However, this is only preamble to the scene where we see Klaatu accidentally shot and then Gort opening its visor and eliminating the weapons assembled around with a ray beam. Klaatu (Michael Rennie) emerges from the saucerĭirector Robert Wise generates a great sense of awe in the meeting with the alien – in seeing the seamless metal surface of the saucer open, to the appearance of Klaatu in his glittering metal suit and then of the robot Gort (played by the impressively imposing 7’7″ Lock Martin, who was found working as a doorman at Graumann’s Chinese Theater in Hollywood). Accompanied by an enthralling Bernard Herrmann score, we follow the saucer’s path circling the globe, taking in, documentary-like, news scenes from all over the world and cutting away to troops mobilising, before the saucer lands right in the midst of Washington D.C. There is a marvellously exciting opening. What strikes about The Day the Earth Stood Still is the starkness and strident urgency with which it makes its point. ![]() Of course, what such change signals is the story come to the screen having been transformed into a post-WWII, post-Hiroshima message about peace. One of the subtler changes is also that in the story Klaatu is shot by a religious fanatic, not an edgy trigger-happy soldier. ![]() The short story is set in the future and there are many differences between it and the film version, including the classic twist ending, not replicated here, where it is revealed that the robot is actually the master and the alien man the servant. The Day the Earth Stood Still was based on a short story, Farewell to the Master (1940), published in Astounding, which was the science-fiction magazine of the era. Most importantly, it was one of the very first alien visitor films of the 1950s – it was in fact the second, the first being The Thing from Another World (1951), which came out six months earlier the same year. The Day the Earth Stood Still is one of the genuine classics of the science-fiction genre.
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