As my family was driving back home from our stay in New York City for July 4th weekend, my brother rented TDTESS thinking it would be a nice action thriller. It succeeds in this respect, it had some nice action sequences. Of course the story was very implausible and very hard to believe, and all throughout the movie I was very aware of this fact.

But overall I thought the movie was poor because of its moralizing agenda. The political philosophy of environmentalism, and IMO marxism to some degree, was very obvious, so obvious in fact that one would have to be deaf to be unable to percieve it.

In fact, just understanding the premise reveals its moralizing agenda. The movie is premised on the idea that aliens, who represent a large group of civilizations, come to destroy the human race because we are polluting the earth and are endangering its capacity to support life, and therefore we must be stopped since so few planets are capable of supporting intelligent life.

The idea that we are destroying this planet was deliciously mocked by George Carlin when he loudly proclaimed in his standup show that the planet will be fine and isn't going anywhere, but WE are the ones who are ****ed. Further, if someone seriously thinks that we are destroying our planet, I encourage them to pick up a copy of Johan Norberg's book In Defense of Global Capitalism, Published in 2003 by the Cato Institute. By every measurable standard, the overall quality of life for humans has dramatically increased in the past 30 years, and this has taken place most rapidly in CAPITALIST countries. That this movie tries to decry capitalism is painfully obvious.

Now if the premise of the movie wasn't enough to reveal its agenda, even more revealing is the protagonist's attempt to reason with the alien (played by Keanu Reeves) by saying that "we can change our ways" throughout the film. Further, Keanu tries to facilitate this change by going to the U.N. and speaking with our "leaders". That is what we call "statism"

Towards the middle of the movie, Reeves is brought to a nobel-prize winning biologist played John Cleese, who says that only during disaster or the brink of disaster do we "change". I may just be paranoid, but that sure does remind me of the worker's world revolution that Marx advocated.

So that's the political philosophy that I really did not like. This movie also has the testicular fortitude to weigh in on metaphysics. Jaden smith plays a child who lost his father in Iraq, and so he brings Reeves to his father's gravesite because Keanu has these wierd healing powers and one time brings a guy back to life (after being dead for a few seconds), and so Jaden thinks that the alien (reeves) can bring his father back to life. During this, Keanu says that nothing really dies, everything is just transformed.

HELLO! This isn't some self-evident truth of experience, its a very particular metaphysic of reductionist nominalism and rejection of substance and property dualism! I've already outlined the numerous problems with this metaphysic in this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zjrBMn_nIX0&feature=related and I dont believe I need repeat my problems with this metaphysic here.

So, in sum, The Day the Earth Stood still is a moderately entertaining action thriller, although the implausibility makes the story very unbelievable plus how it very obviously preaches very poor philosophy to its audience kills it.