The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951)
Directed by Robert Wise
An alien and a robot land on Earth after World War II and tell mankind to be peaceful or face destruction.
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What critics compared The Day the Earth Stood Still to
The nod to 1951’s classic “The Day the Earth Stood Still” seems overt, too, with its message that humans need to make peace and find common ground at the risk of becoming alien snack food.
The real touchstone here is Robert Wise's The Day the Earth Stood Still, which used a sci-fi apparatus to argue for universal brotherhood.
It reminds me most of the 1951 sci-fi classic, “The Day the Earth Stood Still.”
Like the iconic 1951 thriller “The Day the Earth Stood Still,” it ratchets up exceptional tension between hopefulness and paranoia.
It features phenomenal special effects and many shivery-good moments, but “Arrival” is at bottom a resolutely old-fashioned movie, essentially an update of 1951’s “The Day the Earth Stood Still.”
More “Contact” than the 1951 version of “The Day the Earth Stood Still” (Did I mention that Tim Burton’s “Mars Attacks!” is one my favorite alien-encounter films?), “Arrival” does not bode well for “Blade Runner 2049,” which Villeneuve is currently directing.
That's then mixed in with the old King Kong plot (that similarly inspired the "military must kill the beast" plots of all those 1950s monster movies) as well as an obvious homage to the sci-fi classic, "The Day the Earth Stood Still" with its large robot, Gort, and a similar anti-violence message.
On a thematic level, Ultron is quite fascinating, especially in his assessment of the human race and how its biggest problem is nothing less than itself (a theme that has been interwoven into numerous sci-fi films in the past, ranging from Robert Wise’s The Day the Earth Stood Still, to James Cameron’s The Abyss).
But the conversation happened all the way back in 1927 with “Metropolis,” again in 1951 with “The Day the Earth Stood Still” and then again and again with “2001: A Space Odyssey” (1968), “Star Wars” (1977), “Tron” (1982), “Blade Runner” (1982), “Short Circuit” (1986), “RoboCop” (1987), “Star Trek: Generations” (1994), “The Matrix” (1999), “A.I.
We can see this in Robert Wise’s The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), whose basic premise of peaceful aliens warning us about our inevitable self-destruction was borrowed by James Cameron in The Abyss (1989).
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With its glorious effects — not to mention a robust Bernard Herrmann-esque score by Joseph LoDuca — this film is first and foremost a tribute to Ray Harryhausen, though Raimi also finds room for shout-outs to William Shakespeare, The Day the Earth Stood Still and especially The Three Stooges.
As the reluctant hero, he's a walking anachronism who shoots up ghouls, turns his Chevy into a tank, and can't remember how to pronounce a series of magic words that pay homage to Robert Wise's The Day the Earth Stood Still.
The politician has a point: As presented here, the human and machine sides of Iron Man essentially correlate to Klaatu and Gort in 1951's "The Day the Earth Stood Still," the alien duo that demanded the world accept the presence of a robotic peacekeeping force, or else.
Suffice it to say that Blomkamp and his entire cast and crew have created an instant genre classic that transcends the self-limiting ghetto implied by the term "science fiction" and instead, like precursors such as Robert Wise's The Day the Earth Stood Still, engages not only the mind but the heart as well.
Just as films about misunderstood benevolent aliens in the 1950s (The Day the Earth Stood Still, It Came from Outer Space) were calling for an end to the Cold War us-and-them mentality, District 9 is likewise making a strong statement about the damage that can be done when refugees are treated with suspicion before being given any compassion.
But Peele is busy dishing up the saucer—an old-school model, with a touch of the funky Frisbee, possibly descended from the spaceship that landed in “The Day the Earth Stood Still” (1951).
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Bird fills the movie with jetpacks, ray guns, and sci-fi totems of all kinds, like a man-size model of the original Gort in Robert Wise’s The Day The Earth Stood Still (51) .
As far back as 1927 with “Metropolis,” in 1951 with “The Day the Earth Stood Still,” and in 1956 with “Forbidden Planet,” human-influenced A.I. beings have been go-to tools for sci-fi productions.