It’s profoundly shitty and tedious. I shelled out $15 to see it in IMAX when the special effects are mediocre CGI and you barely see anything or anyone, in the sense that the destructive quotient contains no human scale nor much in the way of grandiose devastation. War of the Worlds was much, much better, and I know I’m alone in liking that movie. Keanu Reeves earns mild praise (from the Onion, even) because casting an actor who can’t act in the role of emotionless alien Klaatu is apparently some kind of coup. Actually, it’s embarrassing that he’s considered a selling point. It’s never good to feel embarrassed on a movie’s behalf. I’m also embarrassed on A. O. Scott’s behalf, because he has nothing specific whatsover to say and clearly didn’t watch it.
A mawkish subplot involving family reunification is basically de rigeur in these kinds of movies, but Jennifer Connelly and her stepson aren’t the least bit interesting. John Cleese has an utterly superfluous cameo wherein he plays a Nobel laureate in “altruistic biology” (can you believe that in reality, there is no such thing?) and who actually keeps a big lecture hall-type blackboard chalked over with equations in the same room as his award. Umm, sure. And Kathy Bates is sadly unconvincing as a tough-as-nails SecDef who nonetheless takes orders from an unseen president.
But the movie’s real crime is sputtering inertia. There is no dazzling opening sequence of a city getting blown up or a fleet of spaceships hurtling toward earth. Even the ending looks like a retooled Cloverfield, with characters huddling under a footbridge in the park. The sphere in which Klaatu travels is completely derivative and unremarkable. The supposed global panic brought on by the alien invasion exists basically as stock images culled from news reports of Third World Cities Going Cuckoo Bananas. It also intrudes in the narrative as a cancellation of all New Jersey Transit trains in and out of Newark. Move over, Independence Day!
There were two good sequences: when Jennifer Connelly’s character is rushed to a military facility on highway closed to traffic and when the alien sentinel (who looks like a big black Cyclops from X-Men) emerges. The former feels like a tight moment in a really good Harrison Ford political thriller, and the latter is just cool looking. But that’s seriously it.
The Destroy New York! genre came to its apex (thusfar) in I Am Legend, which displayed a meticulous understanding of the city. You could tell they gave a shit. TDTESS comes from tech nerds who live in the Eastern Hemisphere near the equator, and who know what the Empire State Building is and where Central Park is located–and that’s it. Even a movie like The Day After Tomorrow, which was bad overall and played fast and loose with geography, had far better visuals. A moment where characters drive through an abandoned Manhattan, including Times Square, is rushed and had in any case been achieved six years ago by such a lackluster film as Vanilla Sky. Indeed, set to Radiohead, it was that movie’s high point. There is just no visual climax to this movie. Grey goo melting a truck on the NJ Turnpike is just not a satisfactory stand-in for the whole world standing still and pondering its destruction. I give it one-and-a-half jalapenos. The only movie in the Destroy New York! genre that’s worse is Meteor, from 1979, when Sean Connery comes out of retirement to save a hot dog cart from a chunk of Skylab or something.
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The best thing about Klaatu is the eponymous band. People thought they were a secretly-reunited Beatles for awhile. “Dr. Marvello” is a good song and they also wrote “Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft,” which the Carpenters, of all people, later covered as “World Contact Day.”
Suck the Rainbow 