The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951)

Before the remake hits theaters this weekend, I decided to take another look at he original The Day the Earth Stood Still and see if I liked it any better the second time around. The first time I watched it I was kind of bored and underwhelmed by it, but times and tastes change and maybe I was just in a restless mood that day. If nothing else I wanted the original fresh in my mind to compare with the new version.

The opening ten minutes are probably some of the most exciting in the film. An eerily glowing flying saucer buzzes across the Washington DC cityscape before hovering down for a landing on a local baseball field. It throbs eerily but initially shows no sign of action. As the ship lays quietly and unassumingly on baseball field, swarms of tanks and soliders circle it, guns at the ready. Finally, the lone figure of a man emerges and proclaims, “We have come to visit you in peace and goodwill.”

Rather than be appeased by this statement, the soldiers all raise their guns higher. Of course, the being doesn’t help matters by drawing out a strange silver device that, at the flick of a button, suddenly extrudes several metal prongs. He gets shot by a gittery soldier for his unwise action. So much for peace and goodwill!

The wounded alien, called Klaatu, is not hurt badly and is patched up at a nearby hospital. However, his mission is not panning out well. He announces to a representative of the President that he has a message that he can only deliver to all the nations of Earth simulatenously. Soon, he learns that territorial foreign powers refuse to send represenatives and demand that Klaatu come to them. Now look, I know tensions were bad in the 50’s. The cold war was on, people were digging fallout shelters and students were going through bombing drills where they were encouraged to crawl under their desks and kiss their collective asses good-bye. But you’re going to tell me a man from space landing on Earth is not enough of an incentive to send somebody-- any low-level shlub would do-- to see what this visitor has to say? I wonder if things were really that bad, or if the filmmakers are just showing a bit of a pro-USA bias here?

Soon Klaatu sneaks out of the hospital and decides to hide among humanity for a bit. The theory here, I take it, is to observe first hand what humans are like and try to deduce if there’s any hope for them. To this end, he gets a room at a boarding house, and listens at the supper table to the chit-chat. He wanders around DC with a young boy visiting monuments, and has a talk with a local scientist. Besides the fact that it moves with the speed of an iceberg, here’s what’s wrong with this section: Klaatu really doesn’t experience all that much of the extremes of human behavior, and I’m not sure how he can take away much of anything from his sojourn. The most inspiring thing he finds about humanity comes from an inscription on a monument. The worst of humanity he encounters is-- well, the fact that a mother would leave her young son with a complete stranger so that she can go gallavanting with her boyfriend!

A huge manhunt is on for Klaatu, and although he gets a bit of help from the boy and his mother, he is soon tracked down by the military and shot in the back while he is running away. See? We are warlike-- we just indescriminantly gun down unarmed men in three piece suits!

Now we get to the part that was probably the most thrilling for fifties moviegoers, wherein Klaatu’s robot companion Gort flips the fuck out and makes a beeline for where Klaatu’s body is being held. Here is where we should get to see some full-on ramapaging robot action, but even here I was disappointed. Anytime the film deals with Gort, it’s in half-measures. Earlier, when Klaatu came for a visit to the ship, the robot approached from behind two soldiers guarding the saucer. But then there is a quick cut to the little boy’s face and by the time we switch back the soldiers are lying in a heap. Did Gort knock their heads together or just crumple them with a sweep of his massive arm, or what? Even as he marches out into the world to retrieve Klaatu, his wave of descruction basically consists of him shooting people and things in his way, and they quickly and cleanly disappear in a flash of light. Gort so doesn’t kick ass in this movie the way you really want him to.

Back on board the ship, Gort uses the technology therein to revive Klaatu, who finally delivers a message from the galactic community to the Earth. Basically he says, if you want to kill each other, it’s disgusting but we’ll deal. But if you start shooting up ships into space with deadly atomic capabilities, we’re gonna burn your world to a cinder and you’d better believe it brother! It’s a pretty potent message, but if he didn’t need the representatives of the world to be present after all, why didn’t he deliver it 12 minutes into the film? Unless something about what he saw in the interim somehow changed the content of the warning. If this is the case, I’m not sure Klaatu’s epiphany is spelled out enough.

By the way, the Christian parallels in this story completely went over my head until I read about them on wikipedia. They do seem pretty obvious now that I know they’re there, but it sure seems like an arrogant move on the part of the filmmakers. It’s like they’re saying, “Our point of view on this issue is so correct, even Jesus himself is on our side.”

Most people consider modern remakes a blasphemy, especially if the original is as highly regarded as this film is. But frankly, I think the original The Day the Earth Stood Still is slow-moving and occasionally dull, with questionable dialogue and stiff acting, and only has enough story for an episode of The Twilight Zone rather than a 90-minute feature film. If Klaatu is really going to reach an opinion on human culture, he should experience a wider range. He should have to be exposed to homeless people huddling in an alley. He should attend a church service. Or a VA hospital. Or a high school football game. He should be on line at a Wal-Mart on Black Friday. He should be forced to watch an episode of The Hills. And as for Gort, he should really tear shit apart. I hope the new filmmakers let him off the leash and really let the ignorant masses learn that they shouldn’t mess with what they can’t comprehend. I can totally see how The Day the Earth Stood Still was a notable work in the time it was created, but it could certainly benefit from a rethink and a more modern sensibility. Whether Keanu Reeves and the director of the Exorcism of Emily Rose are the ones to make it work remains to be seen.

Rating: 7/10

Space Doubles Collection #1: Set the Controls

Th3rd World Studios' Space Doubles is a project that I admire out of proportion to how much I actually enjoyed it. Combining horror and science fiction dates back to the infancy of the SF genre-- after all, many consider Frankenstein to be the very first science fiction novel. There were plenty of pulp stories to crossbreed these genres, and the EC Comics of the 50's like Weird Science were only the most famous of the many comic titles of this ilk. With this new collection, Th3rd World clearly wants to pick up the standard and continue the tradition, which I totally support in theory. I just wish I liked the book more than I do.

I think I mentioned in a previous post that I'm not a huge fan of short stories, be they in prose or comic form. It's like hearing a joke; you can't tell if it's a good joke until you get to the punchline. The difference is, a joke takes 20 seconds or so to tell, but you have to invest a bit longer in a story. And if the end doesn't work for me I feel like I wasted my time reading it in the first place. And in the rare case I like a story, I then sometimes wish the author could have fleshed it out and made a proper book out of it. If I am reading a book and I'm not enjoying it, I've been known to bail, or at least skip to the end. With a short story, it seems silly to quit once I've started, so I slog on and hope the "punchline" redeems my time investment.

Space Doubles was originally released as a miniseries with a flip-book format. The title derives from the fact that each side of the book had an 11 or 12 page story, from a variety of different creators. There are more than six stories in this collection because some of these were meant for the never-published fourth and fifth issues, and therefore are presented here for the first time. The book is unfortunately in black and white, but that is no doubt a necessity for a rookie publisher in a merciless marketplace.

"Red Rain" by Mike Raicht and Alecia Rodriguez concerns a mysterious mist which clouds the moon, and an intrepid band of astronauts which is sent to investigate. What they find is bad-- very bad. Both the script and the art are pretty good, but at the end of the day it's just another alien invasion story.
Rating: 7/10

"Everywhere I Look...Bugs!" by Scott Closter (the creator of this series) and Philip Schaufelberger is a pretty neat idea for a mind-bending story hobbled by iffy artwork. It concerns a pretty boy media darling who goes slightly bonkers after a transportation mission to bring flora and fauna to the terraformed moon of Titan. It has a great creepy vibe and twisty finale; it's too bad the main character, supposedly pegged as "James Dean of the Moons" by the media, looks more like Jack Nicholson as the Joker. Oof.
Rating: 6.5/10

"A Saucerful of Secrets" by Jason Hall, Ron Chan and Rich Ellis explores the interesting idea that in the future everyone's life is a blog, but if the public becomes too bored with your experiences you get filed away in a life support tube instead of leeching off our valuable resources. The lead character has already lost his girlfriend and now he's desperate to make his life more interesting.
Rating: 7.5/10

"Escape Pod" by Mark Andrew Smith and Matthew Huynh is a somewhat lightweight entry about a supermarket clerk confined by modern living and puzzled about his former life prior to a car accident that left him with amnesia. The answer is pure wish-fulfillment, baby. Huynh has an interesting style reminiscent of Paul Pope, but he needs to work a little more on things like perspective.
Rating: 6/10

My favorite story in this collection is "Sympathizers" by Justin Robinson and Aneurin Wright, which actually uses the short format to good purpose by giving us a long view of relations between humanity and a sympathetic alien race that comes to Earth seeking asylum and a new start. Turns out their homeworld was ravaged by war and the Quagaar have relocated to escape their warmongering brethren. Initially they are welcomed with open arms, but relations become decidedly strained when the violent tribes from their homeworld begin spreading out and attacking human colonies.
Rating: 8.5/10

"The Liberty Movement" by Dwight L. MacPherson and Kevin Mellon is a pretty good little alternate timeline future Nazi Empire tale. To say that Gestapo interrogator Niklas Rommel is conflicted in his work is an understatement to say the least. A visit from the leather-clad freedom fighter called the Liberator changes everything. Manages to be both fun and dark, no easy feat.
Rating: 8/10

"AKA" by Ben Raab, Deric Hughs and Pat Quinn is a lame serial killer story that I wasn't feeling in any way.
Rating: 5/10

"Project Obeah" by Leah Moore, John Reppion, and Jeremy Dale is a perfectly serviceable zombies in space tale that doesn't transcend the genre in any noticeable way. A bit of a Twilight Zone style twist at the end isn't enough to distinguish it from any number of other zombie tales on the stands these days.
Rating: 7.5/10

"Finite" by Andrew Dabb and Lee O'Conner is a super-creepy exploration of what happens when a fairly desperate man has the power to perform a mercy killing on an entire devolving culture. Brutal.
Rating: 8/10

"Rehab" by Mike Baron and David Newbold has the worst art in the issue by far, and the story is far from Baron's best either. It's about a failed bank robber with robotics skills who strikes up an unlikely friendship with the warden. Really.
Rating: 4/10

So there you have it: as you can see, a decidedly mixed bag. I leave it up to you, dear reader, to decide if a cumulative rating of 6.8 is good enough to warrant a buy. If you skip the few duds, you will probably have a better overall experience than I did. I wish Th3rd World well with future annuals in this series, but in this instance I sure wish I could have checked this out of the public library instead of shelling out... however much I paid for this thing. How do comic shops know what to charge for this-- I can't find a price anywhere on it!

M-Theory #1

The creators of M-Theory pretty much state their intentions right on the cover, which is clearly an homage to the EC sci-fi comics of the 50s. This title is chock full of retro elements that wouldn’t be out of place in those books of old: aliens, monsters, robots, and space rangers armed with ray guns and jetpacks populate these pages. Sadly, the theme doesn’t continue on the artistic side, which doesn’t reflect the EC style in any way and is a big letdown.

With so many ingredients thrown into the mix, writers Dwight L. MacPherson and Bruce Brown unveil no fewer than three plotlines in the premiere issue in this mini. The first involves the fallout from America’s first contact with aliens in, you guessed it, Roswell New Mexico. The second takes place in Princeton’s science department during Albert Einstein’s tenure there and in the third we are off in deep space with the aforementioned spacemen. Presumably these threads will all dovetail together by the end, though how they will be able to coherently accomplish this in just 3 issues remains to be seen.

The lead character of the Roswell section is Friedrick Goetz, a jaded and cynical inventor with his own robot sidekick in tow. Goetz witnessed the arrival of the aliens firsthand, although in this version of events they didn’t crash but rather landed safely and were subsequently blasted out of existence by the trigger-happy U.S. army. Before dying, one of the aliens transfers its consciousness into Goetz, giving him instant knowledge of an entire otherworldly civilization. Over the next five years, Goetz toils in a secret underground research facility replicating the aliens’ technological marvels, but he is bitterly certain the government will never allow the average citizen the benefit of their use.

In the Princeton section, Agnes Font is a young physicist who has built a “quantum receiver” capable of communicating with other dimensions for her master’s project. Now I’m all for equal opportunity, but it seems anachronistic to have one of Einstein’s contemporaries be a cute young female, but then I wasn’t around in the 50s so maybe I just have a wrongheaded idea of gender roles in that time. Anyway, in a classic “be careful what you wish for” scenario, Agnes’ device succeeds in making contact with an alien consciousness which reaches out from wherever-- but when their minds meet she’s overwhelmed and passes out.

In the third and most action-packed section, three unidentified dudes in spacesuits travel around space blasting just about everything that crosses their sights. As I read along, I had in my mind that perhaps these were U.S. soldiers utilizing the tech that Goetz was developing, but really that’s just guesswork on my part. It’s never mentioned who these guy are, what they’re up to, or even if they’re from Earth. Their “shoot first, ask questions later” attitude is reminiscent of the army in the Roswell scene, so maybe that’s meant to be a hint.

Mike Barentine’s pencils killed a lot of my potential enjoyment of this issue. I realize there are not many artists around today who can compare to Wally Wood or Al Williamson, but at least an attempt should have been made to emulate the EC art style in some way. Barentine’s zany Mad Magazine-style cartooning is not only not attractive, it makes the whole project seem lightweight and disposable, as if the creators are saying “you weren’t planning to in any way take this seriously, were you?” If someone put a blaster to my head and forced me to say something positive, I would point out that Barentine draws good distinctive faces, but that’s about it.

Behind the scenes, the situation with M-Theory seems as messy and disjointed as what’s between the pages. After issue two had already been solicited MacPherson and company decided to part ways with Shadowline and Image over compensation issues, the result being that issue one is the only one you are likely to see on the stands anytime soon. Now I notice that issue two (but not one) has been posted on WOWIO, so it doesn’t seem likely that any kind of profit is going to be turned on this thing.

It’s a pity that I don’t dig M-Theory more, it has all the elements of a fun little retro tale, but the creators don’t seem to be saying much new or interesting with them. And the art simply isn’t my thing. I appreciate the effort, but I would only give the finished product a 6/10. It’s too bad they couldn’t get Al Williamson out of retirement to draw this, but then again they probably couldn’t afford him, especially if they’re going to be giving the issues away for free.

Serpo

I am a big fan of science fiction, but for the purposes of this review let me emphasize the word "fiction". I don't believe in UFOs and I find ludicrous the thought that we are constantly being secretly visited by extraterrestrials who completely avoid detection, if for no other reason than the governments of the world don't have the competence to pull off such a vast cover-up. I expect with a universe as vast as ours, there is certainly other life out there, but I tend to think of it more as single-celled organisms or a nice grey-green moss, perhaps. But an advanced civilization with interstellar capabilities and an interest in crop circles and anal probing? Not so much. But it's fun to imagine.

The new Devil's Due graphic novel Serpo purports to be a comics dramatization of real-life events as documented on the website Serpo.org. According to the conspiracy theorists there, Roswell New Mexico was indeed the crash site of a UFO in 1947, and one surviving alien was recovered from the wreckage. In this iteration of that old chestnut, the Greys are referred to as "Ebens" (short for extraterrestrial biological entity) and hail from Serpo, which is said to be a habitable planet in the Zeta Reticuli system. Messages sent back to Serpo from the crash survivor pave the way for a cultural exchange during which 12 American soldiers traveled to the alien world for over 10 years to learn about their people.

Like I said, I don't buy any of this for a second, but it's a perfectly fine premise for a work of fiction. Unfortunately creators Jason M. Burns and Joe Eisma come far short of hitting a home run on this one, it's more like an infield single. There's no one thing that ruins my enjoyment, but rather an accumulation of a lot of little nitpicks that add up.

The framing sequence of this story involves the very tired device of the intrepid reporter being run around in circles by a mystery informant. He gains access to the hush-hush journal of the supposed leader of the expedition (referred to as 102, since nobody involved can reveal their true identities), and almost immediately shadowy Men in Black are out to get him. Isn't this the easiest route to go and very stale by this point? We all know that the reporter will keep hitting brick walls, never find a credible witness, and won't be able to break this story so the whole world comes to know and believe. Sorry, did I just ruin the ending for ya?

The diary isn't even written that convincingly, it almost sounds like an invention rather than a credible artifact. For instance, one entry starts off like this: "July 21, 1965: Almost two years had passed between the initial introduction of the team to Project Crystal Knight and the day of the actual exchange." Wait, what does he mean "had passed"? If he's writing in a journal, wouldn't the entry be in the present tense, "have passed"? It sounds more like someone writing his memoirs from a much later date, as if Burns forgot what form his narrative was supposed to be taking. And why are the first few entries colored a uniform beige, and then for no reason the flashbacks are in color for the rest of the way?

By the way, the two year gap mentioned above points out another problem I had with the graphic novel: time just shoots by too fast. In less than 75 pages we must zip through nearly two decades of the narrator's experiences, making this at times seem more like a Cliffs Notes of a much more involved (and possibly rewarding) story. Very little of the characters beyond the two leads are fleshed out at all. The fact that there are just two women on the trip with many males is never even mentioned. No one hooks up or even gets knocked up during a 10 year mission? At one point Serpo is attacked by another race, but we never see them again or learn more about them. At the end of the first chapter, one angry member of the mission gets himself in hot water with the Eben lawmakers, but this is completely glossed over at the beginning of the next.

This character, called 203, is particularly egregious because he is so ridiculously insubordinate and untrustworthy. If I were a solider, I would be insulted that this character is even implied to have made it through training without washing out, let alone being picked for an elite team representing our entire race.

And ultimately, the Ebens really aren't all that interesting. They dress in boring robes and live in boring huts. Like humans, they have families, bury their dead underground, and play soccer. In short, I wish the aliens were more alien. I suppose the creators could try to argue that their hands were tied because that's what “really happened“, and that's what Grey culture is “really like“. If so, they would have been better off adapting some other first contact story; science fiction is just loaded with ‘em, most more deserving of a comic adaptation than this.

The art by Eisma is pretty good but rarely thrills. He seems at his strongest when he gets to draw weird creatures, like visiting aliens and escaped lab experiments. Other times, his storytelling is way too obvious, such as when 102 tells the others, "let's just hope none of us has to take the cyanide way out" and Eisma actually draws the leader taking out his cyanide capsule and holding it up for them to see, as if they otherwise won't understand what he's talking about. Overall, the art loses a lot of the detail and becomes more basic looking towards the end, as if he was taking his time early on but then later rushed for whatever reason.

Serpo is by no means bad, in fact I would say it's very-- competent. I suppose that's damning with faint praise, but really it's not like I threw the book down in disgust. Maybe I expect too much sometimes, but I was hoping for something a bit more original, imaginative and absorbing. I would give this book a 6.5.