"Klaatu barada ... uh ..."

So I just got around to watching the remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still on pay-per-view, and much to my surprise, it didn't suck. Too badly ...

Granted, it ain't a patch on the original with Michael Rennie. But I didn't expect it to be. I expected an FX bonanza (check); Keanu Reeves in a perfect role, that of an alien as wooden-faced as a cigar-store Indian (check); and a story that, if the gods were kind, wouldn't be too terribly preachy or condemning of the human race for making such a mess of things (check).

And I expected to be mindlessly entertained for 2 hours (check, more or less).

It didn't suck. Not exactly the most fulsome of praise, but then, we're all learning to live with lowered expectations these days.

And let's face it—it was worth the $4 for the scene with Keanu and John Cleese (in Sam Jaffe's role), playing dueling calculus on the blackboard. I mean, Keanu doing Minkowski equations? That was harder to swallow than the nanobots eating New York. (Oops; spoiler.)