I just got back from a screening of the updated “The Day the Earth Stood Still.” I know that it was universally panned by critics and friends, but I wanted to see it anyway (and it was showing at the local $2.50 theater, I could have seen it for a buck had I waited until Tuesdays!). I’m not entirely sure why everyone hated it, except that maybe the makers were too aware of the 1951 classic and the audiences/critics were not. I have a copy of the Robert Wise directed classic and made a point of watching it some time ago in anticipation of this new “re-imagining.” My guess is that the remake fails for some because Keanu’s Klatuu has none of the “wonder” that the Michael Rennie alien-in-our-midst had in the original. And except for the conversation with John Cleese as the Noble-winning mathematician we don’t seem to spend any time with any character enough to care about their fate. Well, we do spend time with the boy, Jacob, well played by Jaden Smith, but the kid was downright irritating at times. Everything else felt rushed and most of the rest of the characters were basically stereotypes, including one government suit who let a technician die in a test chamber, but yelled for someone to open the door when the control room he was in was about to be overrun.

But there were little moments that got me. One moment was when Jennifer Connelly’s character is caught making a call home to her step-son on a forbidden cell-phone, the soldier who had just banged on Connelly’s bathroom stall door demanding if she had a cell phone, then teared up asking if she could use it. Another moment was when Keanu turned the tables on the government agent who was giving him a polygraph test. Reeves deadpanned, “I’m going to leave you now,” and the agent seemed to sigh before passing out on the table.

Whereas many films released these days suffer from not enough editing and indulging the director’s ego too much, this film could have spent a bit more time letting a little character development happen beyond the boy and his step-mom. As with the 1951 version dripping with Cold War paranoia, this one is overly “An Inconvenient Truth” without ever showing us what we were doing to our environment. Writing 101: show me, don’t tell me. Oh, and I love that the name of the robot, GORT, in this version is a military acronym. Perfect.