'Earth' remake no match for the original

Remaking a movie classic can be like saving a planet. Sometimes you should think twice about it, no matter how seductive the idea.

The new movie version of "The Day the Earth Stood Still" - based on director Robert Wise's 1951 science fiction classic about an extraterrestrial who is sent to warn the Earth's inhabitants of impending nuclear disaster - is a good-hearted but pretty shallow special effects extravaganza. It's a movie that keeps throwing in scraps of the old movie to try to make up for the fact that its new ideas are often lousy.

"Klaatu barada nikto" is the 1951 movie's famous alien catchphrase. But this show couldn't klaatu a barada if its nikto depended on it.

Part sci-fi chase thriller, part disaster epic, part family trauma drama and part global warming cautionary tale, this new "Earth" sends Keanu Reeves as Klaatu, the alien who comes with a message for our planet and hangs out with an earthling family to see if we're worth saving. Jennifer Connelly stars as astrophysicist Helen Benson and Jaden Smith is her ill-behaved tyke Jacob. They join Reeves on a race with catastrophe, in which we're often just as worried about Jacob's manners as whether the world will end.

The original was a great message genre movie, a sci-fi sermon against the nuclear arms race that still packs a punch. It was just '50s-hokey enough in its visual effects (a flying saucer, a robot named Gort) to become a charming period piece. The new movie - directed by Scott Derrickson ("The Exorcism of Emily Rose") and written by David Scarpa - may become a period piece. But its charm is mostly invisible, even though its effects summon up everything from "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" to "The Good Earth."

Even its premise now seems faulty. Why will the planet be saved by unleashing hordes of rampaging metal insects who look as if they might, locust-like, devour everything? And can the good example of the Bensons really change Klaatu's mind when a bad example is being set by the president, his know-it-all Secretary of Defense (Kathy Bates) and the military? Can Jennifer Connelly and John Cleese (as Nobel Prize-winning Professor Barnhardt, who specializes in altruism) tip the balance for humanity?

One thing the new "Earth" does have is a lead actor who really looks and acts like a man from outer space. The original had Michael Rennie, an Englishman educated at Cambridge, whose advantage was that he seemed more sophisticated and civilized than that film's earthlings, especially gee-whiz little Billy Gray ("Father Knows Best"). Reeves, with his opaque dark eyes, chiseled features and strange humorless delivery (something like an anchorman from "The Twilight Zone") often sounds as if he came from several worlds away, here more than usual.

Actually Connelly does look as if she could redeem humanity. But poor Kathy Bates, great in the right roles, has been saddled with one of the worst parts of her career: Secretary of Defense Regina Jackson, who looks and acts like a cross between Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and Nurse Ratched. Holy klaatu barada nikto!

"The Day the Earth Stood Still"

@x BTO factbox text bold with rule:Starring: Keanu Reeves, Jennifer Connelly, Kathy Bates, Jaden Smith

Directed by: Scott Derrickson

A 20th Century Fox release. Rated PG-13 for violence. 103 minutes