This has turkey written all over it

I'm not a big fan of movie remakes in general, and when someone decides to redo one of the best movies of all time, they better have a damn good approach. This just ain't gonna do it.

In nice stroke of plotting, the filmmakers come up with a reasonable explanation for why Klaatu looks human: He's really an entity made of light, and decides to visit Earth in human form to experience life the way the locals do! He comes in a gooey womb-like bio-suit which incubates him for a while before peeling off to reveal Keanu Reeves. If this still sounds hokey, remember that in the old version, Klaatu stepped off the ship fully formed in a silver nylon spacesuit.

Really!? He's made of light!* And he wants to experience human life like a local? Let's just hope he doesn't drink any green alcohol or get hooked on television, maybe he'll be OK. (Noted - it looks like a remake of that movie is coming out next year. Oy.)

It gets better.

"In re-imagining this picture, we had an opportunity to capture a real kind of angst that people are living with today, a very present concern that the way we are living may have disastrous consequences for the planet," Reeves said. "I feel like this movie is responding to those anxieties. It's holding a mirror up to our relationship with nature and asking us to look at our impact on the planet, for the survival of our species and others."

Great. Not only are they remaking one of the classics, they're throwing in a remake of An Inconvenient Truth for the same price.

I think i'll stay home and watch this on DVD.

=====================
* One of the best parts of the science fiction game, for me, as a reader and viewer, is the "how did that get to be that way" challenge. It's not necessary, and seldom desirable, to spell out all the details of how the miners on Voltan 6 were transformed into worker drones of the intergalactic bee hive as a result of breathing in the virus laden dust 600 feet below the surface of their arid planet which had been deposited there millenia earlier in the first wave of insectoid colonization. A skilled writer who understands the tropes of the genre well can provide enough information while telling the story that we can figure that out for ourselves.

The inability to do that is what killed Contact, for example. Well, that and Matthew McConaughey.