I recently re-watched The Day the Earth Stood Still, one of my favorite movies since I first saw it roughly 50 years ago. As I wrote about it 15 years ago,
This is one of the first serious science fiction films, and since the minimal special effects take a back seat to old-fashioned concepts like “story”, “character development” and especially “acting”, it’s still better than just about everything which has come along in the genre since. Michael Rennie’s portrayal of the alien diplomat Klaatu set the bar for humanoid aliens for decades.
But this was the first time I saw it under the influence of THC, thus allowing me access to a new level of appreciation of how good it is. The skillful direction of Robert Wise (The Haunting, The Sound of Music, and Star Trek: The Motion Picture) and the striking and innovative score composed by Bernard Herrmann (Citizen Kane, The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, and Psycho) create a dark, paranoid, and suspenseful mood which marks the film from the outset as a serious, thoughtful film which has virtually nothing in common with the silly, low-budget sci-fi movies which were typical of the genre at that time, and the near-perfect casting of the principals (Michael Rennie, Patricia Neal, and Sam Jaffe) did justice to an intelligent script which never panders to popular attitudes nor talks down to its audience. Despite the fact that he comes from another world, Rennie’s Klaatu is completely human; he is ignorant of Earthly culture, but his reactions – frustration at Earth people’s irrationality, genuine affection for Helen Benson and her son, a warm smile when he discovers what a music box does – allow the audience to understand that he is no monster from outer space, but a man overwhelmed by the gravity of his mission. And one of the emotions he displays, fear of the consequences should he fail, unlocks a more subtle meaning in the film than its overt anti-war message. And that message is just as important to modern audiences, 75 years after the movie was made, as the more obvious one.
In reviews, analyses, or discussions of the film I’ve read over many years, Klaatu’s warning to Earth is often mischaracterized as a threat, but that is an error resulting from not listening carefully enough to the dialogue. The word “threat” would imply that Klaatu, or at least the government he represents, has control over the potential doom hanging over the Earth. But he absolutely does not; his speech in the final scene is not, “Do what we say or else,” but rather, “Here is a situation that exists, and we felt Earth ought to be warned about it.” There is heavily-underlined foreshadowing in the scene where Klaatu and Helen realize the military has their taxi surrounded:
- Klaatu: I’m worried about Gort. I’m afraid of what he might do if anything should happen to me.
- Helen: Gort? But he’s a robot. Without you, what could he do?
- Klaatu: There’s no limit to what he could do. He could destroy the Earth.
But the danger is fully spelled out in Klaatu’s final speech:
We have an organization for the mutual protection of all planets and for the complete elimination of aggression…For our policemen, we created a race of robots. Their function is to patrol the planets in spaceships like this one and preserve the peace. In matters of aggression, we have given them absolute power over us. This power cannot be revoked. At the first sign of violence, they act automatically against the aggressor. The penalty for provoking their action is too terrible to risk.
Let me emphasize that: the interplanetary confederation has put all weapons under the control of robots like Gort, and there is no way to revoke that power. The situation is not candy-coated or presented as Utopian; a few lines later Klaatu says, “We do not pretend to have achieved perfection, but we do have a system, and it works. I came here to give you these facts.” On the most obvious level, the film presents a warning about the costs of barbarism. But on a deeper level, the film asks, “Was it wise for these other human beings to give absolute power to machines whose response to aggression of any kind is almost entirely unpredictable?” There is no “right” answer, not for Klaatu, nor for the Earth people within the story, nor for us in the audience. There is only a choice, and the decision to cede control over one’s security to an inhuman, unstoppable power, however terrible the alternative, is not without cost. 
