After slicing up Kenau Reeves as well as it can be done ("He's the actor's equivalent of a black hole, a distant and mysterious cinematic negative space") , reviewer Peter Suderman zeroes in on the silliness of the remake of "The Day the Earth Stood Still":
Sadly, most moviegoers are not gifted with Reeves's uncanny natural ability to coolly surf waves of incomprehensibility, which means all who stay will have to face the full impact of the film's nonsense. The offenses start small: A bit of meaningless technobabble about an object traveling toward the Earth at "three times ten to the seventh meters per second" is followed by nods of super-serious agreement amongst scientists approaching the orb as they whisper to each other about "electrostatic interference." But more often than not, the film essentially admits it has no clue what's going on. Twice, Dr. Helen Benson (Jennifer Connelly) is directly asked just that question — not specifically, but in a very general sense — and twice she responds with a mystified shrug. Sometimes, screenwriter David Scarpa has his characters engage in delaying tactics, promising to explain things later. "All will be explained en route," a generically square-jawed government agent tells Connelly when he recruits her, only to reveal a few minutes later that he, also, has no clue. Unsurprisingly, Klaatu is of no help either: when asked "what's going to happen to us" near the end of the film, he responds with half-hearted curiosity: "I was just wondering that myself," though you get the sense he's really just wishing he'd grabbed another tuna sandwich.
I wasn't really looking forward to a pro-Earth, anti-human lecture, but the movie sounds like it might be too funny to pass up, right up there with "An Inconvenient Truth" as an environmental
