The 1951 s-f classic refashioned into a tolerable time-passer on a fast track to oblivion. The urgent mobilization of an ad hoc team of scientists and the descent of a UFO on Central Park get the movie off to a gripping start, once past the prolonged opening credits and 1928 prologue. And the dissipation of the robot GORT (a military acronym for Genetically Organized Robotic Technology) into a deadly locust cloud is quite spectacular. He, or it, still can’t hold a candle to his, or its, clunky archetypal namesake in the original. Most of the action, under director Scott Derrickson, is mere going-through-the-motions; and for all the bigger and splashier special effects, and all the dashing around the countryside, the remake somehow feels smaller in scope, narrower in vision. Meddlesome busybody aliens affronted by humans’ mistreatment of the planet (“It’s not your planet”) seem a little petty alongside self-defensive aliens worried, post-WWII, about humans spreading their bellicosity throughout the universe. Jennifer Connelly, as a really hot astrobiologist and really warm interracial single stepmom, is convincingly hot and convincingly warm if not convincingly astrobiological. And Keanu Reeves, sad to say, as the expressionless human husk of an emotionless extraterrestrial, has never been better. With Jaden Smith, Kathy Bates, John Cleese. (2008) — Duncan Shepherd
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