[contains spoilers for The Day The Earth Stood Still]

Over the weekend, I watched The Day The Earth Stood Still, a 1950’s sci-fi classic retooled for the present day…   if by retooled one means transformed into a nauseating smorgasbord of left-wing cliches.  Yowser, this puppy has everything from the Good Muslim to the Trigger-Happy Military to the Evil Guy With The – Ooooh! – Flag Lapel Pin, and those are just for starters.   Hey, thanks for guiding us with your moral wisdom, Hollywood Moviemakers – I guess you really do get enlightened during all that time you spend driving between divorce court and rehab.

Anyway, as to the movie’s plot:  Keanu Reeves plays a monotonal alien, which is kind of like me playing a conservative novelist.  He comes to earth on a mysterious mission so the Secretary of State summons astro-biologist Jennifer Connelly, because when aliens invade your planet, dude, you need the cutest scientist you can find.

Jennifer discovers that Keanu is sort of a spaceman Al Gore – like Al Gore himself – on an enlightened mission to save the earth from pollution.  How is he going to accomplish that?  Why, by destroying the human race that causes all the mess, of course.  That’s right.  He’s going to murder every man, woman and child so the trees won’t die.  And he’s the good guy!

It must’ve been really hard for the people who made this film to understand why it underperformed at the box office – as hard as it is for us to understand how they managed to give themselves colonoscopies with their own heads.  I mean, they actually thought we were going to root for a creature who was going to slaughter our children in service to An Inconvenient Truth.

On the other hand, the film is quite remarkable in one sense.  It’s the only Hollywood picture I can think of that actually tells the truth about the current environmental movement.  By assuming Keanu’s Bizarro Gore is the hero – rather than the destructive, murderous monster that he is – the moviemakers openly confess to us that they, as environmentalists, are human-hating, self-hating cultists worshipping a planet as a god like the savages of old. They actually believe it’s worth hobbling civilization at the very least, and killing the human race in its totality at most, if it will save the precious earth from destruction.

But why?  What’s so great about the earth?  It’s just a rock floating in space, after all.  The only really interesting thing about it is that it happens to support life – and the only thing that makes life itself interesting is the consciousness capable of perceiving it.  That’s us, you environmental boneheads!  The majesty of the whale, the grace of the leopard, the beauty of the sunset, even the blue of the sky – none of these even exists outside the imagination of man.  And it’s that imagination that expresses itself, not just in the concertos of Bach and the plays of Shakespeare, but in our cities and factories and machines and systems of trade -  in civilization itself.   Let’s conserve and replenish our natural resources for sure so we can keep building what we build.  But it profits us nothing to save the world if we lose the achievements of humanity.

In real life, from the banning of DDT that left the third world to the mercy of malaria through to Al Gore’s current assault on our economy in the name of an hysterical nonsense, the environmental movement has been very dangerous stuff.  By depicting the despicable and superstitious attitude underlying that movement, The Day The Earth Stood Still shows us just how dangerous it may one day be.