The film wasn’t nearly as bad as I expected. It was disappointing that the environmental moral of the film is explicitly uttered by several characters. If you weren’t scared of nanotechnology before, you will be after seeing this movie!

I heard quite a bit of negative word of mouth about this flick and had my expectations set pretty low when I started it up tonight. I was quite pleasantly surprised. Now I’m not saying that this flick was a cinematic masterpiece by any means…it definiely had its flaws, but it was far from the monstrosity that I had heard it to be.

Remakes tend to be a touchy subject and I have some purist friends that seem to think that remaking a movie… any movie... is somehow a sin. I tend to be a little less of an extremist on the subject. There have definitely been many, many shamefully bad remakes over the years. Tim Burton has struck out on two remakes: Planet of the Apes and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. John McTiernan should be shot for what he turned Rollerball into, and I don’t think I will ever forgive Steve Martin for having the audacity to rty and fill Peter Sellers shoes with The Pink Panther. On the flip side of the coin are movies like Ocean’s Eleven, The Thing, and Scarface. The remakes of these films were as good, if not better the second time around. (Of course, I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out that the 1959 version of Ben Hur with Charlton Heston was the third version of that flick.)

I guess the question for me is, can the movie be improved upon in some fashion while remaining true to the ideas and concepts of the original. I thought The Day The Earth Stood Still did a very good job of this. The original movie is still there and honored, but I found the remake much more interesting in a number of ways. The improvement in special effects goes without saying, but I enjoyed most of the tweaking that was done to the storyline as well. It brought a classic movie up to speed with what is now a completely different society than when it was made. Like I said, not without it’s faults, but very enjoyable overall.