I never had or attended an Oscar Party, but I used to enjoy watching
the Oscars on television, maybe because I was caught up in the show
and was young and clueless. Hey, these people are in films, they MUST
be really cool and wonderful and deserving of our praise, right?!

Now when I watch it, all I see is arrogance, megaegos, and lots of
money being spent on these people who are essentially just a source
of entertainment - and usually not even that. I did not even watch
last year's Oscars in large part because of this, but also because I
do not recall being terribly interested in any of the films in the running
that year.

Getting back to the “reimaged” TDTESS and how Hollywood forces its
limited education values on the public which pays for this flotsam, the following comments contain MAJOR SPOILERS, so do not read ahead if you want to remain surprised by this film, but personally I think you should save your $10 for something better.

The alien Klaatu, who has come to Earth to teach humanity a lesson regarding its primitive and barbaric ways by destroying us in order to save our planet’s environment (I thought humans were part of Earth’s environment, but I am not an overpaid and overhyped Hollywood type, so what do I know?) eventually learns that we are not all bad from the lessons of being with a small child and his mother, who is of course attractive and just happens to be a scientist.

That cliché of a small child teaching an alien about the wonders of humanity is so old I remember Omni magazine making fun of it in the 1970s. And of course ugly people aren’t allowed to have cool adventures.

Having finally realized that humans aren’t all bad, Klaatu then sacrifices himself to stop Gort from destroying us all with nanotechnology (he’s been updated a bit from the 1951 film, which had a 7 foot 7 inch tall actor in a silvery rubber suit). CGI was in short suppy then.

Klaatu’s sacrifice does save us, but at the price of all our technology being destroyed. So supposedly now that we suddenly no longer have iPods or PCs or toasters or indoor plumbing, we will all be much better, happier, and nicer creatures to ourselves and Earth’s biosphere.

Right. Certainly nobody before the Age of Electricity ever went to war or otherwise harmed a fellow human being when they lived in Eden.

I have a friend who lives in New England who was just told they won’t have power back for at least another ten days thanks to the ice storm that hit them last Friday. Already he has had neighbors scavenging in his yard for firewood and is worried that someone might steal his generators, which he had to travel 50 miles to get for a cost of $1800. And this was not an earthquake or hurricane or terrorist attack.

Which leads me to my other complaint about the Hollywood half-assed approach to allegedly saving the environment, the uneducated delusion that technology and science are bad and the cause of all our problems and why an alien race is going to come to Earth to kick our butts into oblivion. If we do survive at all it will be because of that very thing the
Hollywood types disparage.

As far as I am concerned, the original TDTESS remains a true classic and hopefully the “reimaging” will go the way of other such mistakes like the remake of Rollerball, in the dollar bin at Best Buy. At least all the 1951 version pushed on us was the message that nuclear is not good for you, which makes sense and back in the day was important enough to reinforce because there were experts saying that radiation was not all that bad and that a nuclear war was winnable.