Empty Spectacle
Timeliness, and to a lesser extent authenticity, are two key words that seem to cause Hollywood studio honchos a great deal of sleepless nights. A summer blockbuster’s raison d e’tre is a thoroughly predictable script, some basic good guy-bad guy shtick, lots of expensive cinematography and wherever applicable, special effects. The more successful exercises in this genre, like Independence Day, or even Gone With the Wind, succeed because they don’t pretend to be anything other than the grand blockbusters they are. When the studios try to make one of these and try to give it a dash of relevance, what you get is The Day the Earth Stood Still.
A remake of the 1951 sci-fi classic, the film stars a dour and expressionless Keanu Reeves as the extraterrestrial Klaatu. He has arrived on earth— along with his genuinely scary bodyguard robot—seemingly determined to annihilate the human species which has been stupid enough to pollute the earth, pushing it to a destructive tipping point. “The planet is dying,” says a grim Klaatu, and you’re immediately reminded of the many other movies where the principal lead has uttered these very same words.
But you can sympathise with him, as all the human beings in the movie, including an infuriating US Secretary of State, seem hell-bent on trying to destroy a being who can deflect missiles by merely raising his hand. Others try to worship him. With representatives of the human race such as these, who needs enemies? Faced as we are with a scary climate change scenario, and still in the grips of a worldwide recession, the producers hope that the eco-terrorism of Klaatu would seem timely.
Wrestling with authenticity is another epic blockbuster, Baz Luhrmann’s Australia. A modern state, only recently starting to come out of its deeply troubled past, the land Down Under is mythic in scope, and thanks at least to the Great Outback, a cinematographer’s dream. So you can’t fault Luhrmann for trying to make an epic World War II era period film about white cattle ranchers and their problematic relationship with this ancient land, its animist culture and its indigenous people.
Nicole Kidman plays Lady Ashley, an Englishwoman who arrives at her husband’s ranch on the eve of the war to find him mysteriously dead, and an unscrupulous cattle tycoon trying to take over her huge farm. The war effort needs food, so Ashley and her Australian cowboy help Drover (Hugh Jackman), must drive the cattle over inhospitable terrain to Darwin. As a plot, this might have worked fine, but to give the film an epic narrative art, there’s the story of a little boy of mixed parentage who is being hunted by law enforcement so that he can be placed in a government institution—one of the many political pot shots the film takes at the thinly disguised racist practices of old Australia. To further complicate matters, the boy has magical powers and then Japan starts bombing Darwin. Suddenly, too many plots start pulling in too many different directions, and it all becomes a shallow exercise.
In both films, the visuals are just stunning. While Australia’s wide open spaces are filmed to a jaw-dropping effect, with deep colours and a mythic sweep; The Day the Earth Stood Still has special effects that make you jump out of your seat time and time again. Sadly, for both these films, the spectacular visuals cannot save the emptiness within.
