Squandered potential. It tries to get preachy with the topic of the day, and then they try getting heady with evolution and end up missing the fundamentals by an astronomical unit.
I think everyone understands going into this film that it is a remake respun with an environmental moral – much like the recent remake of The Andromeda Strain (which I thoroughly enjoyed until it got to the end. Gimmie a friggin break). The environmental spin is essentially an analogue of the cold war. Or at least that’s how it comes across. Back in the day of the original film the cold war was the general hysteria du jour and the moral was rooted in humans killing humans. Ostensibly over political squabbles. The remake has a throw back to this in two forms:
1. Klatu’s insight that humans “treat the environment like we treat each other”
and
2. There remains the vestigial military complex shooting first and asking questions later.
So, it would seem that the root issue remains. We are a violent and arrogant species and thus we must be destroyed to save the planet. Unless Klatu changes his mind about us.
And this is when it goes wonky and brings evolution into the fold. The notion presented is that it is at the precipice that you evolve. Klatu claims that his race had to evolve because their sun turned into a Red Giant. This is supposedly justification for the earthling argument that now that Klatu has come to destroy us we are at our own precipice and will therefore evolve.
ENNHHHHHH. Wrong. I award you no points. Do not pass go. Go directly to Hollywood Science Jail.
Evolution doesn’t work that way. A species doesn’t decide to evolve. We don’t have a collective will or capacity to do so if we did. Species evolve at the so-called precipice because the ones unfit for survival under the new environmental pressure (or change) Die. That means their genetic material is wiped out and all that remains are those who were fit and naturally selected for survival.
Klatu’s explanation of his home world was sufficiently vague that he can be given a pass. Maybe on his world the ones who survived were the ones intelligent enough to see it coming, were able to flee the planet, and resulted in his people evolving into a clearly more intelligent version. The movie affords us humans no such ambiguity. We are threatened with extreme violence and the argument is that in the face of it we will change our bad ways. In the end it is still the violent authority that is able to enforce its will. Worse still, the only person making the argument that we can change was already converted! No one else on the entire planet has any idea what transpired, why Klatu was there to begin with, or why he chose to spare us in the end. By the end of the movie all I could think of was Dark Helmet from Spaceballs boasting in dulcet tones: “Foooooled Youuuuuuuuu“
Nothing Changed.
The well intentioned remain few.
The ignorant are many.
The strong rule with threat of violence.
And the missing epilogue to this moralistic clusterf* has the United States raping the planet further still for fissile material to wage war against Klatu’s peeps.
Still… be nice to the planet.
