Netflix pick for 2/3/14 – ‘The Day The Earth Stood Still’ (1951)

“The Day The Earth Stood Still” is a science fiction classic from 1951, and it is a classic film for a few reasons, and some of these reasons were actually good excuses for doing an updated remake of this film, but when that happened in 2008, it was a big ole failure because they seemingly ignored the things that make the ’51 original still surprisingly relevant today.

The movie was clearly intended to be a warning to all the emerging atomic power countries of the 1940s and 1950s, as the end of World War II was fresh in everyone’s minds and people had every reason to suspect that those kind of extremely dangerous weapons would continue to be used. Flash forward to 2014, and we got people fighting over nuclear power research and whether or not countries should be allowed to develop and possess nuclear weapons. Throw on top of that a bunch of crazy terrorist war bullshit and we have ourselves an incredibly violent, dangerous and destructive society of people on this planet, much worse than in 1951, which actually makes the final message of the movie much more compelling.

So forget about that 2008 “save the planet” bullshit in the remake and dig this awesome classic movie right here on the Netflix Instant Watch!