Remember that "Twilight Zone" episode in which nobody realizes until too late that "To Serve Man" is a cookbook? Well, when Keanu Reeves says he is "a friend of the Earth" in the remake of "The Day the Earth Stood Still," that doesn't mean what people think it does, either, and it shows just one of the two ways the re-makers have screwed up a classic movie.
One way is changing the perfectly good theme of 1950s Cold War xenophobic paranoia into a Save The Earth Global Warming Screed. Reeves actually says at one point in the film (paraphrasing), "If the Earth dies, you die; if you die, the Earth Lives. Survival of the planet is more important than one species." Really? A superior being from another planet really cares if we beat up our planet? The original was much more believable -- "We didn't care how you fought among yourselves as long as you were confined here, but once you have the capability of leaving the planet, you are a threat to us all."
The second way was casting Keanu Reeves as a superior being.
