Copious Notes

The robot, Gort, attends to a fallen Klaatu (Michael Rennie) as Helen (Patricia Neal) looks on.

The Kentucky Theatre has made a good habit of bringing in summer classics shortly after remakes have come out, and usually the result is reminding us how much better the original was.

Such is the case with this week’s summer classic, The Day the Earth Stood Still.

The 1951 sci-fi classic stars Kentucky’s own Patricia Neal as a woman who unwittingly takes an alien in as a boarder and later helps him in his mission to learn about and save earth.

Neal has admitted over the years that while working on the movie, she thought it was just a throw-away movie about flying saucers, and she did not realize the Robert Wise film would go on to be really good and regarded as one of the greatest science fiction movies of all time.

No one will be saying the same thing about last year’s Day the Earth Stood Still remake starring Keanu Reeves as Klaatu, the role originally made famous by Michael Rennie. According the Internet Movie Database, Rennie was selected because the London stage actor was unfamiliar to American audiences and would be easier for viewers to accept as “alien.” By contrast, many viewers just find Reeves hard to accept.

But he actually was one of the better things about a movie that just didn’t get its source material.

The original Day the Earth Stood Still was an engaging cautionary tale about mankind’s over reliance on violence in the Cold War Era, while the new one tried unsuccessfully to be an action film and graft an environmental message onto the plot.

Check out the original at 1:30 and 7:15 p.m. at the Kentucky. Admission is $4, and don’t forget, “Klaatu barada nikto.”