How much is destroyed? How bad is it? What is the end?
In a nutshell,
[spoiler]Klaatu tells Helen that he is “here to save the Earth”, so she helps him elude government agents, the police & the military and drives him to the middle of nowhere (her bratty stepson is along for the ride in the backseat.) He communes with a tiny, hidden sphere (aside from the giant sphere that brings him to Earth, there are millions of smaller spheres that have been monitoring Earth’s & humanity’s progress). Then, Klaatu elaborates that he is here to save the Earth from humanity, stating that there are only a limited number of planets in the universe capable of sustaining intelligent life, and so the Earth is too valuable to be left to such a destructive, undisciplined race like us. Helen argues that we can change our ways, but he isn’t convinced.
Meanwhile, Gort has been taken to a midwestern research facility. While there, he changes form - from one massive, singular entity to a swarm of insectoids that devour/disintegrate all man-made things & humans in it’s path. It also grows larger as it devours more matter. The swarm cuts a swath across the U.S. The actual extent of the damage isn’t shown, but it’s implied that it is extensive. Many of the tiny spheres around the world are seen to be containing specimens of flora & fauna - presumably to be saved for after the destructive swarm ravages the whole world.
Klaatu is finally convinced that humanity can change by watching a very wooden, schmaltzy stepmom/stepson bonding scene. (Why he didn’t snort derisively and bellow “GOD, you people SO deserve to die!” I can’t understand.) They return to the really big sphere in Central Park, and Klaatu gives his up his own life to stop the swarm. He does this by initiating an EMP pulse so vast that it encompasses the entire planet. Not only does the swarm instantly die, every mechanical device on the planet stops working - effectively making the “Earth stand still.” (Whether this is a permanent or just temporary effect isn’t revealed.)
Nobody recites the line “Klaatu barada nichto!” at any time during the movie. 
[/spoiler]
In a smaller nutshell: don’t bother.
If I were Klaatu and reassessing the fate of the human race based on my brief association with Jennifer Connelly and the kid, I’d go ahead with my original plan.
In the tinest nutshell:
The Earth keeps spinning.
Not that I’ve seen the movie, but personally I’d
Kill the kid and bang Connelly. 
Also, the famous line is uttered (according to my dad; I didn’t hear it) near the very beginning by Klaatu after he gets shot at. It has no plot relevance, though. The really bad thing is that they broadcasted this movie into space. If I were an alien, and I saw it, I’d nuke us from orbit just to be sure.
Valete,
Vox Imperatoris
Aliens long ago would have picked up the original Donnie and Marie show and if that wasn’t enough to get us nuked, I think we’re safe, unless they become enraged about cutting off Single Female Lawyer in mid-broadcast, but I think we’ve got a few years before we have to worry about that. 
So, that would kill millions of humans. Great.
The human race as a whole would survive though, and that is the way Klaatu’s mind seems to work - he sees the big picture, but not the details.
Actually, one incredibly huge, glaring plot hole just occurred to me: Klaatu states that he come to Earth as a representative of a large consortium of races. He doesn’t mention any numbers, but it is implied that there is a cosmic level version of the United Nations that collectively decided to eliminate the human race. Being removed from the Earth, they would certainly maintain their belief that the human race needs to be eliminated. If Klaatu failed in his mission, they would simply send another emissary to sterilize the Earth! Even if the Earth was prepared & aware of oncoming invaders, it’s obvious that they don’t have the technology to withstand repeated assaults.
It actually reminds me a lot of the Iraq War and people calling for a total pullout. Klaatu goes in and kills a couple million people, but he feels sorry about it, and so he leaves and destroys the economy. Great lesson.
Valete,
Vox Imperatoris
I just got the original movie on DVD; think I’ll watch it tonight. Corny by modern standards, but it works so well as a Cold War movie.
Not to mention that the nanite cloud already gobbled up a couple of people, so it’s not like this one has the care for human life the original had (where, even though every electrical appliance all over the Earth was deactivated, they took care to point out that ‘essential’ systems, such as airborne planes and hospitals, miraculously continued to function).
Well, I thought it probably was just Klaatu’s human form that was destroyed, or something.
However, even worse, Klaatu’s message never actually reaches anybody even remotely important! For all the world, the whole thing is gonna look like a horrible and unprovoked alien attack on the Earth; you think any nation is gonna pay any mind to the Kyoto treaty while overstocking their arsenals for future visitations?
So, what you are all saying is that : “The robot did it”
Casting Keanu Reeves in the lead role for this was a genius move. Apparently he turned down a part in the new Pirates Of The Carribean film for the Klaatu role. They managed to get another plank though.
I saw it again last night, and he says something–the first syllable kinda sounds like “Gort”, but the corresponding line from the 1951 movie is “Gort! Deglet ovrosco!”, not the barada nikto thing.
*
*cite:Edmund North’s script
You mean…
Nevertheless, it moves?
Wasn’t there some kind of article in SciFi magazine about Reeves demanding to keep the line in, though? Maybe it will be in the “Bonus Deleted Scenes”.
Valete,
Vox Imperatoris
I could have sworn I heard “Klaatu barada nichto” at the beginning when Keanu is first shot… on reflection, just what Vox Imperatoris said.
I was sorely disappointed - when I saw the original I really liked it (corny as it is.)
It’s ironic, though - Keanu has no empathy or emoting, so he is the perfect person to cast as the alien.
However, in this particular movie, the alien is a Christ allegory - and how can you cast someone with no empathy or emotion as a Christ allegory?? It just makes no sense.
It’s also telling how easily he gives up on the idea of actually talking to human leaders - he doesn’t even really try.
I’m not too sorry to resurrect this thread – the movie just came out on DVD, and I just saw it.
My immediate impression:
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!
After watching it, Pepper Mill and I turned to each other. She said, “That’s one of the dumbest movies I ever saw.”
Even without the original to compare it against, this movie doesn’t stand up. It’s just incredibly STUPID, STUPID, STUPID.
And it’s dumb.
Just a few comments:
1.) Right at the beginning, I notice something’s wrong. They mention Kathy Bates (who plays the Secretary of Defense – the President and the Veep spend the whole film cowering in their bunkers), and they mention some guy named Bates who did the music, but nowhere do they name Harry Bates, who wrote the story “Farewell to the Master”, upon which the original movie was ostensibly based. “Farewell” wasn’t the best story, but Harry deserves somecredit. They give North ctredit for his screenplay from the 1951 version. But not giving Bates credit is kinda like Andrew Lloyd Webber’s not wanting to give Gaston Leroux a screen credit for Phantom of the Opera. Except they finally forced Webber to do it. On the other hand, maybe the ghost of Bates is happy his name’s not on this.
2.) We start with a pretty pointless prologue set in India in 1928, where a mountain climber evidently provides the DNA used to construct Keanu Reeves. Did we really need this?
3.) Present day. Klaatu’s ship is coming in really fast on a collision course with Earth. Evidently the Aliens don’t want to cloak their ship (they evidently can, as we see later). The Government responds by snatching up scads of scientists and strongarming them into Scientist Boot Camp, shutting down entire highways for this purpose. Heck, they don’t even do that for the President. this is an appropriate introduction to the ham-handed way the governent and the military do everything in this film. If I was in the government or the military, I’d be insulted. But in the closing credits, we learn that they co-operated in the making of this film. Amazing!
4.) They think it’s a meteor about to hit Central Park. So what do they do? They bundle up their Command Team of Scientists and take them to Central Park. The blast wave of the impact ought to do them in, thanks.
5.) When the thing up and simply lands, they send out the scientists in silver suits. These are people who never saw each other until they were abducted and dropped here. They’re not only not a cohesive team, they don’t know anything at all about each other, and have no instructions or hierarchy. But it’s thought to be a good idea to let them kinda wander toward the Big Glowing Thing. The government probably had a backup team of Scientists to use after they threw these sacrificial lambs in.
6.) Well, the ship’s interesting. In fact, it’s a throwback to the unattributed Bateds story – he described the ship as an “ovoid”. It just got changed to a Flying Saucer in the 1951 film because flying saucers were 'hot" (just as the non-saucer ships in “The Thing” and “This Island Earth” got changed into saucers on their way to the screen). But I think that’s purely coincidence. They wanted something weird for this screen interpretation, and it’s purely chance that it echoes the original description.
7.) Klaatu is seen emerging from the ship, and gets shot! At least in the original, it’s because they thought he’d drawn a weapon. Here it’s because the troops have no discipline and/or good communications. … And the Army co[operated in showing them behave like this? What were they thinking?
8.) Gort comes out and threatens to destroy stuff. He cuts off power and shuts down systems, but he’s stopped by Klaatu saying something incomprehensible. On the DVD subtitles, it’s rendered as “Klaatu Berada Nikto”, but it could’ve been “I smell sausage”.
9.) By the way, one thing you can generally count on these days is that the CGI effects will look good. Starship Troopers was a blatantly stupid movie, but its effects were gorgeous. But here, Gort LOOKS like a CGI robot from fifteen or twenty fivve years ago, shot against an equally CGI background. In fact, throughout the movie he’s shown against CGI backgrounds. He NEVER looks believable. The 1951 Gort, leather costume and all, was infinitely more convincing and believable than this.
10,) So they take the shot Klaatu to a military hospital in a gym. In New Jersey, evidently. They loaded him on a plane and zapped him there. Good thinking.
11.) How do you care for an extraterrestrial? You’ve never seen one before. You have no idea what his biochemistry is. They give a token acknowledgement of this at the beginning of the scene, but then forget it. “Medic!” yells the heroine, which is a weird thing for a non-military person to say. They talk about giving him saline, then say they didn’t know if it’s a good idea. Smart thinking. But then they give himn a local anaesthetic when they remove the bullet. Really? You think that’s a good idea? Do you think anaesthetics will work with alien biochemistry? Even if it did, what dose would you use – anaesthetics can kill even humans if the dosage is wrong. For all you know, you’re doing the equibvalent of shooting acid into his veins. (“Don’t give that Newcomer Saline solution, you idiot!”)
12.) Nevertheless, they get a surgeon, who bravely cuts into the body and extracts the bullet. He also pulls out hunks of tissue. For all he knows, he’s pulling off sensory organs in those sample tubes, but he cuts merrily away, pulling off big hunks of tissue because it’s falling off. “Should I continue pulling it off?” he asks Some Guy In A Suit. “Yes, Proceed,” says Suit Guy. We don’t even know if he’s a doctor. But he’s presiding over the first Alien Operation. If I crash land on a planet around Alpha Centauri, I don’t want the equivalent of this team stripping away MY skin.
13.) Fortujnately, we don’t have an Alien Autopsy – the blubber-like stuff is a sort of bio-engineered suit, and it’s supposed to come off. Our idiot doctors lucked out. Our heroine takes a jarful of the blubber stuff and keeps it. Without any sort of refrigeration or anything. If she treated herbaloney sandwich the same way it’d be inedible the next day. But the goop doesn’t spoil. Again, it apparently isn’t supposed to, but there’s no way SHE can know that.
14.) Kathy Bates wants to know if the Aliens are invading. Fortunately, Klaatu speaks English. But he won’t talk, Kathy Bates threatens to put a piece of wood between his ankles and get a sledgehammer. No,m she doesn’t, but she apparently stops short of waterboarding him. Bates wants Klaatu sedated. Again, on what basis do we sedate an extraterrestrial, not knowing their biochem? What would you use? What dose? None of this bothers them. Our heroine shoots him with saline solution, which, fortunately, doesn’t do anything – although we don’t really have a right to expect that.
15.) So they wheel him into an inordinately huge room to administer a lie-detector test to him. Really. Lie detector tests are notoriously untrustworthy and easy to beat for humans. God only knows how they’d work with an alien. But the guy giving the test administers it as if he was asking questions of a guy accused of embezzling. Naturally, Klaatu has Alien Powers, and zaps both him and the guards.
16.) He asks the noew-zapped polygraph expert what size his suit is, and what his security code is. Klaatu knows about suit sizes and security codes. Re-read that a few times. He already knows about us. If he knows enough to ask what suit size a guy is, and what it means, then he really does know an extraordinary amount about us. The whole “landing to learn what we’re like and give us a message” is pretty pointless now. You have to wonder why Klaatu came. At least in the original, Klaatu wanted to learn about people and what the ordinary person was like. Here, he evidently already knows. Why did he land, even? Why bother coming out of the ship?
17.) So he escapes, and collapses. Evidently the surgeon didn’t do so great a job. Or, despite stealing the genetic code from a mountain climber, they didn’t get details like blood clotting right, or something. He calls the Heroine to get some of his Magic Whale Blubber. How does he know who to contact? How does he know that she stole the Magic Whale Blubber? Og only knows.
18.) Afterwards, Klaatu gives her directions to a renfezvous (he knows exactly where to turn. Damn, I wish I could navigate like him on an unfamiliar world.) He takes her to – why not? – a MacDonald’s. Here they meet an aged Chinese guy who’s evidently an alien!!! So they’ve had spies here all along. Noe Klaatu’s visit seems REALLY pointless. If I were the Chinese grandfather alien, I could imagine what I’d be saying to Klaatu in Mandarin: “So, you had to make a splashy entrance with your ship out in the solar system, running right in for Earth and making spectacle of yourself. Right in Central Park, no less! And you get yourself shot and have to hit the “off” switch on your robot. I never did those things. I never made a splashy entrance or brought ot the Giant Robot. You know why? Because I’m a Professional!” Really, if the old Geezer could land and survey the situation without showing up on radar, Klaatu could, too, and could get the info he needs without all the fuss.
19.) By the way, couldn’t he get the message about Humanity and Altruism and all that from Mr. “I’ve Been Here Seventy Years”? Having had an agent in place that long, wouldn’t it be a good idea to listen to him for lomger than it takes to drink tea?
20.) Gort looks fake even when being packaged and taken to Virginia (not the Midwest) And he looks just as fake in his hole in the ground.
21.) Boy, they don’t even get to use the line about “variation of Parameters” with Barnhardt. And he gets convinced awfully easily by a few lines of equations on the blackboard. I’m not convinced he’s a real Nobel Prize winner. And I know John Cleese is a fine serious actor as well, but I still kept expecting a “What’s all this then?” or “As I’ve noticed, you are not from these parts.”
22.) Gort turns into Metal Munching Moon Mice? (well, insects, but still…) METAL-MUNCHING MOON MICE!!! Gort save us! I think the screenwriter read Leo Frankowski’s Copernick’s Revellion, with its metal-eating flies, and thought it’d make a neat movie, so he stuck it in when he thought he was writing The Day the Earth Stood Still.
23.) Why do they have to take the animals off on Space Arks? If they had metal-eating bugs they could simply bring us back to the Stone Age and that’d end our messing up the earth on a colossal scale pretty quick. In fact, the stopping of all power at the end of the film seems to be heralding a new day of low tech. It’s not explicitly stated that the power’s off for good, but it seems more likely that this is the case, rather than Klaatu trusting us not to have our fingers crossed when we promised to turn over a new leaf,
24,() Even if it were Dick Cheney down in his bunker screaming to blast the alien going to the sphere (heck, especially if it were Cheney), I wouldn’t blow up our Negotiator while the Metal Munching Moon Mice were eating up Giants Stadium in the Meadowlands and uncovering the body of Jimmy Hoffa.
Dumb, dumb, dumb. Reportedly the director loved the original film, and wanted badly to remake it. He succeeded in remaking it badly.
Yes, but…
…is it dumber than 10,000 B.C. ;)?