Spoilers. So if you don’t want to know what happens, don’t read further.
General opinion: meh. Didn’t suck, wasn’t great. Kinda-sorta was like the original, except that the aliens are substantially more malevolent and substantially less imaginitive. Whereas in the original they come to Earth to deliver the message “Stop being aggressive or we will murder the lot of you,” this time they come bearing the message “Stop destroying the environment or we will scrape the Earth clean of all forms of life and start it over with the small menagerie of critters we’ve picked up.” They’re still assholes, just dumber.
Gort again plays a role, but instead of being a 9-foot-tall robot, it’s a 30-ish foot tall collection of hungry nanites in the shape of a robot. Gort becomes the cloud of nasties that you see consuming every damned thing in the commercials. The reason why the aliens are all pissy is because the universe has very few planets capable of supporting complex life, and humans are somehow or other killing this one (it’s never explained exactly how, but somehow Everyone Just Knows that humans are killing the Earth). Thus the aliens are here to wipe out humanity in order to save the Earth. But rather than doing something vaguely sensible like releasing an engineered plague to wipe out humans… the Gort-cloud will eat *everything* down to bedrock, and then they’ll reseed the place.
The aliens in TDTEST suffer from a common failing of Hollywood aliens: they have all kinds of advanced tech and power available to ’em, but almost no creativity whatsofriggenever. If you have the sort of abilities displayed here, you don’t wipe out the Earth. Instead, you terraform Mars and Venus and seed *them* with life. Sow self-sustaining colonies throughout the solar system up to and including the Kuiper Belt. But I guess that’s not as dramatic as a Message Movie.
In the end Klaatu (a properly cast keanu Reeves… all he has to do is stand around like a statue, which is well within Keanu’s range) decides to call off the Gort-cloud after it has eaten everything from Indiana to Maryland to Vermont… the same general area that got smacked down by Angry Trees in “The Happening.” The oft-used conceit of the alien seeing humans emote and deciding that they’re not so bad after all is employed once again.
But while the original version of TDTEST had Klaatu shut down all transportation and electrical systems for a temporary display of power near the end of the movie, in this version, he has the planetary technological infrastructure shut down right at the end, leaving humanity in a state of imminent collapse. The tech shutdown is presumed to be a permanent feature, rather than a temporary display. The purpose was to give mankind a chance to change it’s destructive ways. But what such a thing would really do is not only cause famine, plague death and mayhem on a level never before imagined outside of “Zombie Apocolypse” fiction, but also lead to the virtually complete destruction of the ecosystem. Six billion starving, freezing humans, devoid of basic machinery, will not only chop each other into rump roast, they’ll kill everything that flies, crawls, walks or swims, and burn anything even remotely flamable to stay warm. If humanity can get the technology up and running again (and one would of course certainly expect this to happen… I mean, how the hell do you permanently shut down even the concept of a diesel engine?), it’s hard to predict the future, but one thing would be certain: we’d harbor a genocial grudge against them alien mofo’s what who killed nigh on five and a half billion of us. If the aliens make the mistake of not regularly checking up on us, the next time we meet there’d be a hell of a fight.
4 Responses to “The Day The Earth Stood Still”
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how does a world look like in wehich technology suddenly shutrs down (and the author is careful never to explain why..)
S.M. Stirling “Dies the Fire”
http://www.amazon.com/Dies-Fire-Change-S-M-Stirling/dp/0451460413/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1229284707&sr=8-1
trust ,e – its good .. 😎 ..
bonus feature: a major villain who is intelligent and has good reasons for his actions … (but he has nothing to do with the shut down)
special bonus feature: the villain has read the “evil overlord list” and follows its precepts
I rather lost interest in Stirling around 10 years ago when i had some online run-ins with him (or at least someone posting as him). He came across as a martial-arts elitist gun-grabber… someone who actually thought that the world would be better off if everyone gave up firearms and took up karate. Yeah. Like Granny could face down some thug in his prime .
Haven’t read Dies the Fire, but the Wiki description sounds about right… he’d basically have to magically make gunpowder not work in order to create the world he’s after. Because even if electrical systems somehow permanently fail, with firearms some modicum of hope would remain of civilization surviving; without firearms, though, we would quickly devolve into the worst form of barbarism, where the strong would rule the weak by the invincible power of the wooden stick with a nail in it. Some people get off on that vision of the world, I suppose…
Can’t recall what the title of the story was but I read a similar concept short story in which a “benevolent” alien empire which shows up one day and declare that Humanity is taking the wrong path and needs to be “reset” with a line I’ll always remember: “These Humans and their weapons are just too dangerous to leave lying around unsupervised”
So they release something that basically shuts down all our technology including firearms. Since it is set in the ‘present’ at the time (during the Korean war no less) part of the story follows a retreating group of U.S. Army people as they scamper to find a ride off the penisula as the “screaming hordes, who were never that far from the knife and sword” come pouring from the north.
(Managing to confuse North Korea, China and Ghengis Kahn’s Mongols all in one racial sterotype :o)
The high-and-mighty starship commander from the empire looks down at frantic humans scrambling to find ways to survive and pronounces his work done. We’ll check back in 20-30 years, engage warp-drive ensign whats-it and on to our next destination.
Fast forward a decade or so and the “Asian-hordes” have been preying on Europe… Again, go figure :o)
But the Europeans have found an allie in the resurgant United States, (actually after a few years of panic, plauge, starvation and such you get the impression that most of the “west” managed to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and get back to living) who lend them not “weapons” or “armies” but our new proffesional military which practices a form of “psycho-history-managment” which allows those learned in the art to manipulate an enemy against himself.
Exampled by the advisor to the European armies by the man who had helped pull his unit out of Korea when the balloon went up.
He comments that once you truly know your enemy, you can easily manipulate them by using his own strengths and weakness to defeat him before he even knows that he’s fighting.
Short-point: superior intelligence and battle planning defeats numerically superior “horde” with numerically inferior forces available to Europe without massive US troop intervention.
Fast-forward another 10 or so years and our hero sits in a hidden command bunker as he watches relayed video, (we got our tech back somehow) while dozens of technicians relay commands around the globe as the representatives of the aformentioned Alien Empire step out of their ships to greet the Human survivors and begin them on their path towards a ‘correct’ civilization.
Banter back and forth between characters suggests we know enough about the empire and the aliens that run it, and we are coreographing everthing about our encounter. The comment is made that it should be less than 10 years from now we Humans will be running the alien empire and making stellar policy because as our hero notes:
“These guys are way to dangerous to have running around unsupervised”
As you noted that some people actually DO get off on visioning a massive ‘change’ that robs us of our technology and forces us back to an earlier level. I recall a story (IIRC “The Waverlies”) where a ‘natural’ force comes to Earth and absorbs electricty and radio waves. While not a complete technological disaster the writer sets Human civilization back to about the mid-1800s and while some people die we obviously had too much population anyway and once we’re back to trains and steam cars we will find we’ll all live hunky-dory and be much happier too.
I’ve noticed that being an on-again-off-again theme for some Sci-Fi/Fantasy in that the concept that pops up now and then. If only we were thrust back into the (pick-your-favorite-slice-of-history) we’d all be so much happier and more productive because we wouldn’t have to submit to the rat-race, couldn’t fight international wars, wouldn’t promote global economic domination, what-have-you.
I also tend to find that like the various “utopia” themes out there, the hazey part is getting from “here” to “there” in that the assumption is YOUR utiopia is what everyone else wants so you won’t have to work hard or fight for it.
The reality is always going to be uglier and more difficult than people imagine, and the fact is that somewhere along the line you’re going to find people who DON’T agree with your idea of utopia and are willing to do whatever it takes to keep you from implementing it.
Randy
> I also tend to find that like the various “utopia” themes out there, the hazey part is getting from “here” to “there” in that the assumption is YOUR utiopia is what everyone else wants so you won’t have to work hard or fight for it.
This is a point worth noting not only for sci-fi… but for *politics.* We (the US) have just entered a new era where, seemingly, we will be diving headlong into socialism. Many seem to think that by taking from the productive and giving to the non-productive, we’ll create a workers paradise. Well, guess what… lots of peopel don’t *want* a workers paradise. The idea seems like a dismal form of Hell, to me. So to create their paradise they’ll have to fight the very people who could make the thing work.