MovieChat Forums > The Day the Earth Stood Still (2008) Discussion > Advanced alien civilization that sucks a...

Advanced alien civilization that sucks at history, studying, and ideas


Four problems with the alien civilization;

"We are a race that crawled out of the slime of selfishness and into enlightenment ourselves when worse came to worse, hey we totally didn't notice these facts of our own history until you pointed them out!"

"We've been monitoring your species a long time and despite you steadily learning the importance of other species and increasing awareness of environmental stewardship with each passing decade, still vastly flawed yet reaching a point where you have even insects under government protection, we haven't noticed any capacity to change whatsoever, nope. We're not saying you're not changing fast enough, that it's too little too late, we're saying it's not there at all."

"We've been hoping you'd change for a long time, we've waited and waited, we've . . . . pretty much sat on our hands. When we finally do decide to take action the first and only action we could think of was genocide. You humans probably have more humane measures against insects you dislike, but that was all we could think of."

"I've been monitoring your race for decades and I never happened to notice this "love" thing. Yeah, you humans probably know more about the behavioral nuances of ants running at your feet than we do about you, we just paint your species as the "black" in "black and white" which kinda makes us look really detached, cold, oddly prejudiced and as well as a bit reactionary ourselves."

The last one actually kinda reminded me of the cold government bureaucrat or heartless straw vulcan scientist archetype you'll see in other movies.

I know the aliens were viewing the earth as a whole and humans as just one species on it. Humans aren't supposed to be special in this movie, but I still think the aliens should've been able to do better than this. Also, humans aren't a threat to earth's ability to support life.

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I might be wrong here, but wasn't the message of the film about empathy?

The other alien that lived as that Chinese guy (Mr. Wu) had hated being sent here until he had learned to live with humans properly instead of just studying them. He grew to love us.

Klaatu, himself, experienced it in the final stages of the film, and repeated the "At the precipice we can change" thing. Meaning his own race/species/lifeform/whatever.

The obnoxious little fleshwaste even discovered a taste of empathy towards his stepmom, far too late to make me like him though.

So the alien race might have 'studied' us, but they couldn't possibly 'know' anything about us without empathy, which they achieved as "they stood on the..." yes enough already, we get it, the freaking "precipice". Way to labour a point!

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0e3tGxnFKfE

http://tinyurl.com/LTROI-story

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I'm glad someone else noticed this. The movie was mediocre at the best of times, but the conversation with John Cleese and Reeves's allegedly advanced alien lifeform was just forehead smackingly ridiculous. I particular like the moment when Cleese's pondering that the aliens' behavior might not really be all that reasonable at all Keanu stands in a silent stupor as though they had been so giddy to rush into their elaborate xenocide they hadn't really thought about it, but now you come to mention it...

The premise of a race that is superior in both intellect and ethical reasoning, yet seems to lack the intelligence to recognize that their behavior is neither reasonable nor ethical could only work as a campy satire. However this dour faced attempt is deadly serious in its stupidity.


What if a squirrel wants a sausage?

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Absolutely right

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stick with the 1951 original

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