It's still a very serious moral fable, with flaws that I'll get to later, which comes across as thoughtful and is superbly directed, with oe of the most effective flying saucers in all of cinema. But the characterisation... well, Klaatu is a bit of an arrogant dick (I'll get to that later too) but otherwise we have a bunch of characters who are essentially just ciphers, along with the most "gee whiz" kid in the history of cinema. And, well, let's just look at the plot, shall we?
Klaatu is from 250-odd miles away, so within the Solar System, if a little further than the suggested Mars or Venus, both plausibly inhabited by what was known in 1951. That being the case, you can sort of see how the fact that Earth has nukes and is starting to explore space travel might be seen as a threat. But expecting humanity to entirely expunge all aggression or face genocide? I mean, come on. I'm as big a wishy-washy liberal as they come but aggression will never be removed from human nature, nor is it necessarily always a negative or violent thing. And in threatening to destroy us Klaatu is not exactly occupying the moral high ground. That would be collective punishment, as blatant a war crime as there could possibly be.
Oh yes, and then he is killed by violent humans and resurrected by Gort in an obvious Christ parallel, something that has to be done thoughtfully to avoid being pretentious and, while I'm certainly not religious, I have to observe that nowhere in the Gospels, or so I believe, does Christ threaten to destroy the human race if they refuse to follow his teachings.
That aside, though, I genuinely enjoyed the film, honest! it's extremely well made, watchable, and while its message doesn't quite work it is at least about something. It also gave us the names for no fewer than three denizens of Jabba the Hutt's sail barge...
I was a huge UFO buff when I was a child because I loved flying saucers/aliens and everything that had to do with them. I had many UFO books (though I was too young to understand that supposedly there were "real" stories), watched 2005's War of the Worlds often and watched so many UFO documentaries that I watched so often the spine broke. Nowadays, as I get older, your critical thinking sharpens. You realize that real history, coupled with the incredible real-world social history of how the "flying saucer" mythos was constructed, is vastly more interesting than the sensationalized claims on television. It is easy now to mock the concpet, yet still appericate the stories that surround them.
ReplyDeleteOne thing can’t be denied: if it wasn’t for the UFO phenomenon exploding in the late 1940s, we probably wouldn’t have had great sci fi genres, from Star Trek, Doctor Who, Captain Scarlet, Gerry Anderson’s UFO, the 1953 War of the Worlds, The Day the earth stood still, and every classic 50s b film. I used to be a UFO buff as a kid. Even when you grow out of it, there can be no denying that the phenomenon probably had an influence on various classic films and shows.
Of course, the infamous "ancient aliens" doesn’t count, not even in a “so bad, it’s good” way. I can’t believe I used to believe everything about that show at 14 years old…
I'm more or less the same, obsessed with the weird and supernatural as a kid, including UFOs, the Loch Ness monster, and the tail end of the Erich von Daniken stuff. But with age came critical thinking, and scepticism!
ReplyDeleteBut ooooh yes, this whole thing- UFOs, ancient aliens- utterly shaped the popular side of science fiction in the second half of the 20th century on both sides of the Atlantic.