You have my sympathies.
It can't be much terribly worse than the original, which was nothing but one more senseless, preachy B-movie that got reified into a classic only by virtue of being reasonably well acted, having an obnoxious religious allegory, and grasping for something very slightly more ambitious than its contemporaries.
I feel like I'm taking crazy pills when people call it a great science fiction film. The film gives us a protagonist who is a cruel buffoon who blames others for his own bumbling provocation of violence, supports a police state run by
killer robots, thinks nothing of said killer robot killing, evidently would stand by and watch the killer robots commit genocide, and destroys a planet's economy in order to demonstrate that he's really super-duper powerful, and then the film has the
nerve to portray their inept alien ambassador as Space Jesus, who was just
too beautiful for our callous and xenophobic world.
In the original, Klaatu was here to try and induce the earth's population to behave itself. The movie made it clear that he was doing so because of concerns that, once space travel started, the earth's population might behave in aggressive/dangerous ways towards "his" planets.
Therefore, he was not simply some peaceful "space jesus," he was both the carrot (be peaceful and there is much we can learn together and much benefit to you) and the stick (and if you're not willing to do so, Gort and I can mess you up beyond belief). His final speech was basically telling earth that he was giving them a chance, having seen what he can do, to grow up or die.
Well, fine, he's the Space Jesus of Revelation.
Furthermore, the producers weren't saying "no violence at all." It was quite simply an anti-atomic war metaphor. The producers were using the threat of omnipotent beings destroying us as a metaphor for nukes doing that.
Therefore, pretty much everything he did in the film was consistent.
Just because it contained a semi-coherent anti-nuke message doesn't mean that the story is immune to criticism on its own merits.
It has its moments, but it really gets off on the wrong foot when Klaatu lands in a populated area, without advance warning, emerges from his spacecraft, fails to say a word of greeting or warning despite his later demonstrated eloquence, and goes for what could easily be a weapon. No human being would ever have been so stupid, and someone who is purportedly intellectually superior never should have been, either; even if you somehow chalk that up to human propensity to violence, it's still some extraordinary nerve to place any moral blame on humans for their reaction. It's like blaming the animal when a kid jumps into a tiger pit.
Indeed, there was no reason for Klaatu to be on Earth at all. He barely learned anything, except that illegal entry into a nation gets you detained by that nation's authorities, military cemetaries are where we put military dead, and that neither mothers nor children in the 1950s had never heard of the term "stranger danger."
Then it gets worse as he severely damages global society as a demonstration, when he could have done something harmless instead--say, blasting the moon with extinction-level weaponry--or at least less harmful, like cutting power to military bases only.
So, yeah, war is bad, but Klaatu and the Interstellar League of Gorts are
evil. An anti-nuke/anti-war metaphor fails a little bit when the actual lesson of the film is that aliens are sanctimonious drones dominated by unfeeling mechanical commissars, and the entire population of Earth (or, metaphorically, America) must develop weapons capable of hurting their interstellar robot overlords if they are to be free of arbitrary interference in its affairs, and possibly to safeguard its very existence.
So really, the metaphor is more like "those who have a perfect first strike capability are the masters of the universe, and the only way to be free is to have a credible deterrent."
There is also, for more modern audiences, a warning against placing the decision to kill in the hands of giant robots. I doubt this was intentional, given that in 1951, the principal method of launching a nuclear war was manned bombers and computers were in their infancy--that is, I don't think Earth Stood Still prefigures Wargames or The Terminator in any significant way. Although, hey, it's a valid reading.
"You're alive." "No, I'm actually dead."
In the context of the science fiction movie that also made sense. He was shot. He died. The alien tech was able to restore him (not unlike how can now sometimes bring people back to life who "die" on the operating table) but given the damage done to his body it was temporary. He will shortly "die" again.
As for the remake, even if you accept the first version made no sense, the remake made much less sense.
That's probably true. I dunno, it just seems that if you can preserve brain and body functions so well that a dead guy can just walk around, you should probably be able to restore him to life (not just the "Holy Spirit"--I know that line was forced in there, but yuck).
As noted above, original Klaatu had a valid reason for threatening earth: concerns about space travel and the atomic age and the possibility we would try to violently colonize and/or attack other planets. That is: a danger not only to ourselves but to his world and others.
Klaatu is nothing more than an imperialist tool, like an interstellar Matthew Perry, sailing his black ship up to Earth and dictating terms like he owned the place. He was able to, because his ship had
weapons.
Who is the aggressor here? The space people. Yet the movie calls us warlike!
Remake Klaatu was worried about global warming but that wouldn't affect anything but us. So if we killed ourselves off it not only wouldn't affect his world but it might actually make things safer for other planets. If anything, he should have encouraged it to make sure we didn't have time to colonize space.
See, I haven't seen it, but at least that makes sense. If an alien species respects sentient life, there's no particular sense in treating humans as vastly more valuable than the rest of our biosphere. Given that climate change may bring about a mass extinction (though the human species is virtually invincible), it strikes me as conceivably reasonable for an alien government to intervene if it finds a putative right to exist of non-sapient sentients being violated by the dominant life form of a planet. Especially if the effort required to credibly threaten said dominant life form would be trivial, as it would be for any government capable of easy interstellar travel.
On the other hand, caring about the pain and suffering of wild animals is a very deep commitment. Once you start, it's difficult to know when to stop. As they unfeelingly kill each other and are virtually undeterrable from doing so, the only realistic way to preserve the putative right to life of all animals is to create a world-sized zoo. And that's probably not a project any but the most sensitive and rich society could contemplate.
On a third, unexpected hand, I can think of one strong motive for keeping a biosphere stable--you intend to colonize it.
The plot of the movie is a valid metaphor for anti-atomic weaponry/anti-MAD. It isn't for environmentalism. So the original made much more sense than the remake.
Except the original, as I stated above, makes a far more valid case
for atomic weaponry and MAD, because robots are made of metal, and they're strong.
