After finishing 'The Day the Earth Stood Still' somethings been bothering me

Cafe Society
1

Because of the recreational outrage over Keanu’s new role discussed hereand here I felt I had to watch the original in order to make an informed decision to hate the remake.

The movie seems to beg reflection of mass hysteria, petty political rivalry, and above all, mans natural tendency towards violence. However, when it was over I couldn’t help questioning both the gunboat diplomacy of Klaatu’s message that man’s violence will lead to the destruction of Earth (not in a MAD kind of way, he meant HIS people will destroy Earth) and the incorruptible and uncompromising police force of robots that will enforce such laws.

First, his arrival is an urgent (and behind a wooden expression, desperate) message for humanity to quit it’s violent ways immediately or face utter destruction. Say what? A group of technologically advanced civilizations capable of destroying whole planets calling Earth violent is a bit Pot and Kettle. Klaatu tries to make the case that our violence will spread throughout the galaxy and completely ignores the fact that he was able to come to us and we not to him.

Second, as Klaatu himself says, “Your ancestors knew this when they made laws to govern themselves and hired policemen to enforce them. We of the other planets have long accepted this principle. We have an organization for the mutual protection of all planets – and for the complete elimination of aggression. A sort of United Nations on the Planetary level… The test of any such higher authority, of course, is the police force that supports it. For our policemen, we created a race of robots-- (indicating Gort) Their function is to patrol the planets – in space ships like this one – and preserve the peace. In matters of aggression we have given them absolute power over us.”

The difference is our ancestors made those laws to govern themselves, the countries in the UN chose to be in it. He says all this matter of factly as if this is the ‘law of the land’ as it applies to him, but he makes the threat that it applies to us. Ultimately, Klaatu is offering us robotic tyranny and threatening planetary destruction. He says “It is no concern of ours how you run your own planet”, but apparently we’re running it wrong and it is a concern.

2

The “Earth has developed nuclear weapons and will soon develop rockets and might end up a thorn in our side” theme showed up a few times in 1950s movie SF. It’s fundamentally stupid and illogical for the very reasons you bring up, but it made dramatic sense – why would aliens come here? Why come here NOW? What do they want? Answer: We’ve just developed this nifty bomb, unleashing the Power of the Atom (this was only 6 years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki), and the Aliens see this as the first step in our getting up to their level, and want to nip it in the bud. Ta da – dramatic situation set up. If the aliens are infinitely beyond us in technology there’s no conflict, hance no drama. This tortured reasoning isn’t in Harry Bates’ original story, which differs considerably from the film.

The bit about the robot police force Is, however, though it’s more pithily stated in the story’s last line. Again, if we’re in a universe with advanced aliens who we are nevertheless on the first rung of joining. how we conduct ourselves when we try to join their club IS important, and if we try to do so we and they are going to have to agree on the terms. They’re trying to set them. The Robot Police Force isn’t a threat, it;'s an incorruptible Law Enforcement system. It’s a perfect UN with effective Peace-Keeping Force. If you wanna play in their court, you gotta play be their rules.

3

I have always found the “you humans are too violent to join our universe so we must destroy you” plot to be both contrived and stupid. Why not select some ship captain at random to be the representative for all of humanity and put him on trial while you are at it?

And of course, the Gort Squad idea works fine until some asshole decides he is going to secretly develop an anti-robot missle or death ray and take matters into his own hands.

Can’t wait for the new remake:

“My name is Neo and I’m going to beat you robots!”
“My name is Constantine and I’m going to defeat you demon!”
“I’m the guy from Speed and I’m going to stop you famous character actor Dennis Hopper!”
“My name is Klaatu, me and Gort are going to bring our ultimatum of peace to you Earthlings!”
Whoah!!

4

But used as a threat weapon. Klaatu is pointing this gun at us.

It’s a little more than that, though. It’s “Play by our rules, or die.”. Pretty magnaminous to give us so many fun choices…

Klaatu isn’t stupid. He’s gotta realise that the petty humans are going to see this as pretty threating, right? Does he expect to have to blow us away?

5

True, but it’s not an idle or a malefic threat – by the premise they assumed, people will be in a position to threaten Klaatu’s people’s way of life. Again, if it’s not a Live Issue, there’s no drama. Klaatu’s not being nasty – he just wants to preserve his way of life. He sees Earth Folks as the wikld motorcycle gang that’s riding into town with their brand new nukes.

6

That’s very subjective. He’s standing behind the gun, not having it pointed at him.

Maybe the character is so wooden is because he’s done this a zillion times already.

He’s flies in, makes his ultimatum, then blows away the cavemen playing with matches. They (the cavemen) always seem to take his ultimatum as a threat… and he’s starting to get bored with his work.

7

“In matters of aggression we have given them absolute power over us. This power cannot be revoked.”

The gun is pointed at him. He just isn’t worried about it, because he’s not inclined to do any of the things that would result in the gun being fired. If his people started a war, they would presumably be subject to destruction just as the people of Earth would be. That doesn’t make it right, of course. Creating such a situation was arrogant and high-handed of them, at best. Personally, I would be inclined to look for ways to wipe out the robots out of sheer pique.

8

But it has to apply to us, in order to the system to work. Otherwise, they’d be in a situation where we could bombard their planets with nukes, and their own robots would prevent them from stopping us.

The assumption behind your statement is that we won’t catch up. What if there’s some plateau of technology, so we’ll equal them in a century or two ? What if they intend to GIVE us the technology to equal them ? He did come with a technological gift, even if we broke it.

9

Not to turn this into a quagrmire (snerk) but how is Klatu any different from a missionary coming in to “civilize” the natives, or a military coalition removing a destabilizing local dictator?

By saying they dont’ care how we run our planet, I can believe it. They don’t care if it’s a Communist gov’t, a Democratic gov’t, or anything else. As long as we give up fighting wars, they’ll leave us be.

10

Perhaps. Or perhaps he didn’t explain it very well ( a great diplomat, he wasn’t ). For example, perhaps the reason they with their robot police are the prevailing force around, is because all previous cultures killed themselves in wars. There is an argument that the reason we don’t see any aliens, is because any culture that advances too far inevitable annihilates itself. Perhaps it wasn’t arrogance or high handedness, but simple desperation.

So their attitude may be, “If we fight our robots there are two possibilities; we lose, we die - and if we win, we die. Because EVERYONE without them has died.”

11

But that’s just a statistical fallacy. Past successes (or failures) are not predictions of future results.

12

For the life of me I can’t understand by TDtESS is accorded so much respect. Granted, as a kid, I liked it because the production value was high for sci-fi, and Gort was nice and creepy. But as an adult, it’s just silly. It’s a bunch of naive politics wrapped up with a ham-fisted Christ-figure metaphor. If “Star Trek” is “Wagon Train to the stars,” this is “‘The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe’ to the stars” (C.S. Lewis, of course, offered up his own version).

My biggest problem lies in trying to conceive of an advanced race with the ability to power down a planet, or destroy it, that somehow got that way without being subject to the same economic realities as humans. Obviously, their ability to develop such destructive technologies, and their willingness to use it, makes them no different from us.

My second biggest problem is that there’s no real need to police us; just shove our technology in the crapper, send us back to fighting with chariots, and keep us that way. Even if our egos would make us want to join the galactic club, why would they want us as members? Why would they, in fact, want anybody as members? I can think of reasons, the main one being greed, but again they end up being just like us.

My third biggest problem is that I never could stand Patricia Neal.

13

They are when the underlying factors are the same. That’s how people make projections of the future in the first place.

Um, that’s the whole point. That’s why they built those robots.

I don’t understand what ‘economic realities’ have to do with anything. It’s highly unlikely that they have an economy much like ours, with such technology.

First, their robots would likely kill them if they tried. Second, why do you assume they are malignant ?

Again, them being just as flawed of us is why they made those robots. And, why WOULDN’T they want us as members ?

14

Even assuming that was their reasoning, I would still regard it as arrogant and high-handed. It’s based on the assumption that because they (and others they know of) couldn’t control themselves without the threat of annihilation hanging over them, no one can. (I’m not saying humans could–as a species, we seem to have trouble controlling ourselves even under such a threat.) More importantly, they unilaterally set the standard for what constitutes “aggression”. Maybe their criteria are valid, and maybe they’re not, but Gort’s apparent trigger-happiness makes me dubious. Furthermore, there’s no indication that anyone else gets a say in those criteria, regardless of their customs or needs.

Now, if they set the robots to police willing members of their little club according to their criteria and separately to defend against external threats, that would be reasonable. Setting the robots to police emergent civilizations which have not displayed aggression toward them, without the consent of those civilizations? Not so much.

15

“In matters of aggression we have given them absolute power over us. This power cannot be revoked.”

Quis custodes ipsos custodiet?

Who watches the watchman?
or
Who will protect me from my protector?

That “absolute power” schtick makes me nervous. What if a robot malfunctions? Or what if it encounters a situation its programmers never anticipated, and it massacres innocent people as a result?

Or what if, after centuries of gun control, they encounter some aliens, who are violent, aggressive, and more powerful than their robots?

16

Klatuu doesn’t offer us any advanced technology-he baffles the army doctors at Walter Reed Hospital, and makes cosmolgist Sam Jaffe look like a low-grade moron. It was basically a warning…but its a great movie because it reveals so much about the early 1950’s.Plus, the creepy theremin music is neat!

17

I failed to make my point. What I’m meaning to say is that there’s really no way they would build those robots, as they would stifle their creativity. The premise is absurd. It’s essentially Dr. Strangelove.

By economic realities, I mean that there are always shortages to drive behavior, and when the behavior involves an intelligent life form, it’s going to be quite aggressive. It is not going to subject itself to anything that lessens its aggressive tendencies to take what it wants. More technology just means more to take, and more ways to take it.

Seems like their robots are a bit arbitrary as to what they will and will not allow. They will allow themselves to be policemen if the Earth goes along, and genocidal maniacs if it doesn’t. And the latter, to me, suggests considerable malignancy.

Because they’ve already identified us as a threat, and intend to subjugate us, one way or the other. So we’re kind of junior members, I’d say. The logical thing is to just say we’re slaves, since that would be what we would be.

18

I can see your point. But I can see theirs; to them, the idea that you should have a right to arm yourself and potentially or actually threaten your neighbors could be seen as “high handed”, at the least. From their viewpoint, it could be as crazy sounding as someone claiming that the Second Amendment allows private ownership of nukes would sound to almost all of us.

And what about third parties ? They may not think it’s moral to let us cruise around the Galaxy doing what we did to the American Indians all over again to pre-tech cultures.

They die. However, they’d die without the robots too.

Remember the gadget he held out, that a soldier wrecked with an itchy trigger finger ? That was supposed to be a gift.

All the robots enforce are rules against violence, apparently. Unless you are a serial killer, or like to slam asteroids into planets because the explosions look cool*, how does that stifle creativity ?

Except that human history proves you wrong. We have limited ourselves, on a subnational level. They’ve simply gone one step farther. And if we don’t learn how to restrain ourselves, with or without a robot police force, we’re dead.

Coldbloodedness, not malignancy. Or limitations in the robot’s sophistication, or rigid limits on their decision making. Or they were built with the belief that possession of WMDs amounts to intent to commit genocide; basically, ‘By not giving up their weapons, the humans are a plague species, and need to be destroyed lest they massacre billions’. Or it could simply be that once we expand into space and advance far enough, they won’t be able to stop us short of a much larger war.

And they could point out, morally and practically, why should they allow us to endanger them and others ? I see no reason to think that the right to make war on others is some transcendent moral right. And they could point out that our policemen will shoot you if you don’t put down a gun if ordered.

Mind, I’d be irritated if some aliens show up and told us “disarm or die”, but I can see how they might think that’s reasonable. The idea that a culture should be allowed to have weapons of war is an idea that I could see being regarded as hostile and barbaric. I do think that genocide ( if that’s what ‘Earth will be eliminated’ meant - and that it wasn’t an exaggeration to primitives who wouldn’t respond to anything less bloodthirsty ) would be going farther than they should, but the basic position of “war shall never be allowed” does make sense.

So, you take the position that if aren’t allowed to have nuclear weapons, you are a slave ? You do realize that makes almost everyone a slave ?

And if they tried to enslave us, they’d be destroyed by their own robots.

  • “One may hope we have not invented a new art form.” - Footfall
19

Excpet that Gort took orders from Klaatu, where, at least twice that I can think of, he restrains Gort from blowing away the earthlings in the vicinity of the violence committed upon Klaatu. Maybe he said “I do not require or request the Right of Vengence!” or some such, but it appears on the surface, at least, that Gort can be controlled by Klaatu.

I’d be more sympathetic, Der Trihs, if Klaatu had landed and said:

"*I belong to a group of technologicaly advanced civilizations that have banded together for the purposes of mutual defense, among other things. To this end, we have created a race of robots, of which Gort, here, is an example of. We have given him great power, a power more than strong enough to destroy planets, for the purposes of defending ourselves.

We have been watching you. We have noticed your scientific progress, and have come to the conclusion that you will soon reach the stage were you will be able to travel to other worlds. We suspect that your penchant for war and violence will come with you.

Therefore, I have been dispatched to bring you this warning: Any attack upon any member, or planet, of my society, initiates an automatic response from Gort, and those like them. They have never failed in their mission.*"

That’s a fair warning. We had nukes restraining the superpowers in the 50’s, we understood the concept.

But instead, he says “Surrender, and adopt our ways, or die.”. That’s no different from any other empire builder in (human) history.

20

Kinda looks like Klaatu was well on his way to enslaving us with the robots… :slight_smile: