Keanu Reeves plays a man whose DNA is sampled in 1928 in the Karakoram Mountains in India (no, its never explained why) and used in the "present day" (conveniently allowing for the film makers to not let the film feel dated by setting a specific year) to create a body for Klaatu, an alien who represents a group of other worlds who have come to Earth to stop Humans destroying the planet by eradicating all human life and using spheres as modern day arks to save the animal life.
Jennifer Connelly plays Helen Benson a sexy scientist who is called in by the government when they detect an object on collision course with Manhattan that they expected to destroy all life only for it to slow down and land in New Yorks Central Park, she is also the "wicked" stepmom to her dead husbands son Jacob (played by the extremely annoying Jaden Smith who you will end up hoping he dies more than the kids in Jurassic Park. Yes, he's THAT annoying!).
The American Government (run by the Secretary Of Defence played by Kathy Bates, another handy way for the film makers to avoid dating the film by not naming The President or Vice President) react as they always do with force and the alien leaving the craft is hurt and taken into custody to be studied. He heals miraculously and Benson intervenes in his questioning which allows him to escape and go on the run.
Klaatu's robot Gort is also captured for study and escapes and commences to remove all traces of life from the planet but Benson and Jacob help him to return to his ship to save the Earth once they show him not all Humans wish to destroy the planet. This entails a visit to a Nobel prize winning Professor (played by John Cleese, personally I would have removed the whole scene with him in as it isn't explained well enough why they are there or how this helps Klaatu learn more about why Human life is worth saving) in a very boring and extremely difficult to follow scene which just seems to be there to slow the action down for a short while.
Like M. Night Shyamalan's The Happening earlier this year this is also an extremely preachy film about the environment and how Humans are destroying the planet. It's not a science fiction film and it's certainly no attempt to try and either remake or improve the 1951 Micheal Rennie version of this film where they'd come to stop us all killing each other during the Cold War. If you don't feel like your watching sections of The Happening and Cloverfield at certain points in the movie then you pay absolutely no attention to movies when you watch them. The film is highly unoriginal (not just because its a remake, because it blatantly steals ideas from things like The Happening and Cloverfield and it takes far too long to get to the point where Gort starts wiping the Earth out.
The visual effects do look very good but as a whole the film has an incredibly cheap feeling about it (possibly due to the very derivative sections of plot and how long the film takes to actually get anywhere) and you are left feeling very unsatisfied indeed. The ending is extremely weak and left far too open to interpretation as to what happened and what will happen next. Reeves himself plays the role of Klaatu too much like a cut scene from The Matrix, he's very stiff and wooden and you feel a waxwork dummy of him would have done a better (and much cheaper) job of the role. Jennifer Connelly isn't really enough of a star to be playing the female lead (most people will only remember her from Labyrinth) so its pretty pathetic to think Keanu is actually the biggest name in this mainly no-name cast.
The director stated Keanu was his 1st and only choice to play Klaatu which reveals several possible things about him - he hasn't got much imagination in regards to casting, he doesn't know many actors (painfully obvious from his wafer thin resume on IMDb.com) or he has no regard for the movie he made so cast the 1st person he could think of. Being forced to watch a movie with a message is fairly annoying at the best of times but when its someone using Hollywood millions to impose their environmental views on the public then its just a waste of effort, time and money that could have been better used if donated to environmental charities instead of ruining a perfectly good science fiction film.
Jennifer Connelly plays Helen Benson a sexy scientist who is called in by the government when they detect an object on collision course with Manhattan that they expected to destroy all life only for it to slow down and land in New Yorks Central Park, she is also the "wicked" stepmom to her dead husbands son Jacob (played by the extremely annoying Jaden Smith who you will end up hoping he dies more than the kids in Jurassic Park. Yes, he's THAT annoying!).
The American Government (run by the Secretary Of Defence played by Kathy Bates, another handy way for the film makers to avoid dating the film by not naming The President or Vice President) react as they always do with force and the alien leaving the craft is hurt and taken into custody to be studied. He heals miraculously and Benson intervenes in his questioning which allows him to escape and go on the run.
Klaatu's robot Gort is also captured for study and escapes and commences to remove all traces of life from the planet but Benson and Jacob help him to return to his ship to save the Earth once they show him not all Humans wish to destroy the planet. This entails a visit to a Nobel prize winning Professor (played by John Cleese, personally I would have removed the whole scene with him in as it isn't explained well enough why they are there or how this helps Klaatu learn more about why Human life is worth saving) in a very boring and extremely difficult to follow scene which just seems to be there to slow the action down for a short while.
Like M. Night Shyamalan's The Happening earlier this year this is also an extremely preachy film about the environment and how Humans are destroying the planet. It's not a science fiction film and it's certainly no attempt to try and either remake or improve the 1951 Micheal Rennie version of this film where they'd come to stop us all killing each other during the Cold War. If you don't feel like your watching sections of The Happening and Cloverfield at certain points in the movie then you pay absolutely no attention to movies when you watch them. The film is highly unoriginal (not just because its a remake, because it blatantly steals ideas from things like The Happening and Cloverfield and it takes far too long to get to the point where Gort starts wiping the Earth out.
The visual effects do look very good but as a whole the film has an incredibly cheap feeling about it (possibly due to the very derivative sections of plot and how long the film takes to actually get anywhere) and you are left feeling very unsatisfied indeed. The ending is extremely weak and left far too open to interpretation as to what happened and what will happen next. Reeves himself plays the role of Klaatu too much like a cut scene from The Matrix, he's very stiff and wooden and you feel a waxwork dummy of him would have done a better (and much cheaper) job of the role. Jennifer Connelly isn't really enough of a star to be playing the female lead (most people will only remember her from Labyrinth) so its pretty pathetic to think Keanu is actually the biggest name in this mainly no-name cast.
The director stated Keanu was his 1st and only choice to play Klaatu which reveals several possible things about him - he hasn't got much imagination in regards to casting, he doesn't know many actors (painfully obvious from his wafer thin resume on IMDb.com) or he has no regard for the movie he made so cast the 1st person he could think of. Being forced to watch a movie with a message is fairly annoying at the best of times but when its someone using Hollywood millions to impose their environmental views on the public then its just a waste of effort, time and money that could have been better used if donated to environmental charities instead of ruining a perfectly good science fiction film.