The newest movie to join the genre of environmental lectures is "The Day the Earth Stood Still," staring Keanu Reeves. Reeves plays an alien sent to destroy the human race on Earth because, you guessed it, we are destroying the planet via Anthropogenic Global Warming. Ironically, the movie premiers during a week where we are experiencing record low temperatures.
Despite the horrific acting, the worst aspect of this film is that it is a complete bait and switch on the viewer; the trailer gives little or no indication that one is going to receive another Al Gore lecture. Instead, most people are expecting to see a remake of the 1951 science fiction film with no reference to the environment.
Aside from this film being a total flop at the box office, the genre was literally tried numerous times within the last decade. 1) We had "Wall-E," a robot movie where the robot is designed to clean up the dirty planet Earth that has been destroyed by humans; 2) We also had "The Day After Tomorrow," where the entire northern United States is destroyed because of Global Warming, and all the people move to Mexico; 3) We had Leonardo DiCaprio's "11th Hour," which had a stunning collective audience of 16 people; 4) and of course Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth," a slide show with so many distortions that it requires a warning label before being show in Britain's classrooms.
I wish we could just go to a movie and be entertained. Is that too much to ask?
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