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Trailer out for 'The Day the Earth Stood Still'


(Hat tip for trailer to ComingSoon and for poster to LookingCloser).

I really loved the original 1951 film (see the trailer for that one below) and I'm still a bit wary of this remake. I don't have a lot of inside knowledge of the remake, but this trailer tips me off to some potential differences--one in particular. In the 1951 film, the alien Klaatu seems almost from the beginning to stand between the people of earth and their destruction (by the robot and its kind) along with some heavy Christ allusions along the way, but the trailer for the 2008 film seems to indicate the alien will be the harbinger of death and judgement (at least for the humans). That's a significant difference. And for what it's worth, Wikipedia updated the 2008 film's site with this tidbit: "the film updates the Cold War themes of man against man, to the New Age concerns of man against nature." That supports Klaatu's transformation from a kind-of friend of man to (as ComingSoon notes) "a friend of the Earth."

As I've said before, I fervently believe that we humans have a very sacred responsibility to care and steward this earth as God would (and that we could be doing this a whole heck of a lot better than we do), but elevating the value of nature above human life is a misdirected way of approaching this responsibility. Perhaps if we addressed the problems portrayed in the original film (which also invited God-talk into the conversation), the solutions to the ones being addressed in the second would follow. Which again makes the original film all the more relevant.

But I've been told by those in the know to be patient and not so skeptical--afterall, the director is Scott Derrickson (a graduate of Biola University), who wrote and directed The Exorcism of Emily Rose (which received favorable reviews from favs-of-this blog Peter Chattaway and Jeffrey Overstreet) and is attached to direct the bigscreen adaption of John Milton's Paradise Lost.

Heh. Okay, I'll wait.