Lifting Fog

For those of you who know me personally, and perhaps some of those who don’t, I tend to think and communicate in the hypothetical. Despite my roommates’ best attempts to tune me out during an average television viewing session, I am always proposing questions to provoke “intelligent” discussion. I’d like to think of myself as a modern day Nathaniel Hawthorne; questioning my surroundings and looking to expose the complexities of human morality. For some reason, people don’t usually interpret questions like “If you could sleep with Michelle Pfeiffer now or ten years ago, which would you pick?” as Nathaniel Hawthorne-esque, but I always do. WTF am I talking about? Sometimes I don’t even know.

It’s in this vein that I ponder the following hypothetical situation: The Day the Earth Stood Still makes over $80 million. Do you think it will happen? A better question might be, could it happen? I literally have no answer to this. As of right now, before I do the obligatory IMDb and Wikipedia research, I know two things about this film: it stars Keanu Reeves and it’s a remake of a classic Sci-Fi thriller. [pause for aforementioned research moment] Upon closer inspection, I don’t find any more evidence to suggest that this movie will be wildly successful. The writer David Scarpa and director Scott Derrickson have little more credits than Lindsey Lohan did 10 years ago. So I pose another question to 20th Century Fox: why should I (typical male, age 18-24) go see it?

I haven’t seen the original (which is on my Netflix list, I swear) so I don’t have any desire to make a basis for comparison. The last time Keanu Reeves moved me to the movie theater was to see The Matrix Reloaded (and let’s just say I learned my lesson). Jennifer Connelly has never moved me to go to the theater (although I think she’s superb). So why, 20th Century Fox, why would someone like me go to see it? The trailers haven’t presented anything spectacular either, and I’m a huge sucker for a good trailer.

I don’t think The Day the Earth Stood Still will make $80 million because I don’t think anyone cares about its release one way or another. This is very harsh writing for Lifting Fog, so I apologize for those who come here to read uplifting pieces, but I have been asking myself about this movie for a while and as the day approaches when the earth will “stand still,” I haven’t heard much of anything about it or why it’s worth the ticket price. Maybe the earth won’t stand still so much as ticket sales will, but then again, I’ve been known to be wrong about things before.

Tags: Hypothetical Situations, Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Day the Earth Stood Still

This entry was posted on December 5, 2008 at 4:03 am and is filed under Movies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.