Warning: There be comic-book spoilers here.

IGN.com has posted the newest video journal for Watchmen, Zack Snyder’s adaptation of the graphic novel by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons — and around the 1:49 mark, there is a brief glimpse of a theatre that is showing The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951).

This detail happens to come from the graphic novel itself, but I had forgotten it was in there, so my initial reaction to this part of the video was one of amusement, since the film version of Watchmen was shot in Vancouver around the same time that Scott Derrickson was filming his remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still. Not only that, but Keanu Reeves was initially offered the part of a godlike superhero in Watchmen, and he ended up playing the Christlike alien Klaatu in The Day the Earth Stood Still instead — but since the two films were being made in such close proximity to each other, Reeves made a point of visiting the Watchmen set while they were both in town. So this could almost be a sort of in-joke between Snyder and Reeves. Almost.

However, as I mentioned, this detail is actually there in the original graphic novel as well, so it’s more of a coincidence than an in-joke. If I’m not mistaken, it first appears in Chapter 11 (out of 12), in the background to a sequence in which a psychiatrist suffering an existential crisis bumps into his wife on the sidewalk in Manhattan. Here’s a sample panel from that sequence:

The marquee with the movie title appears again, later in that same chapter, in one of several images that depict this intersection mere moments before it is hit by a sudden catastrophe:

And then, in Chapter 12, after the catastrophe takes place — a catastrophe that many will go on to believe was part of an alien invasion — we get an even better look at the theatre, and the bodies of those who died on its doorstep; and if you look closely, you can even see pictures of Gort and Klaatu on the wall:

And what is the significance of The Day the Earth Stood Still to Watchmen? Well, for starters, both stories feature a character who wants to bring an end to war on Earth, and who uses the threat of an alien attack to try to get us to stop fighting each other. But where Klaatu only threatens to do us harm, thus giving us time to discover and reveal our better natures, Ozymandius actually launches an attack, thus tricking the governments of the world into thinking that they must prepare for an even bigger battle down the road against an even deadlier common enemy.

The interesting question here is whether Ozymandius is meant to be the polar opposite of Klaatu, or Klaatu’s darker self.

Now that the trailer for the new version of The Day the Earth Stood Still is out there, the MTV Movies Blog has posted a fun little interview with director Scott Derrickson.

Right off the bat, they talk about Gort, the robot who was at one point rumoured to be missing from the film but can now be seen clearly, if briefly, at the end of the new trailer:

The last shot in the trailer is a hero shot, although strangely not of Keanu Reeve’s character Klaatu, but of his trusty robot Gort. The look of the character deliberately recalls his look in the 1951 original.

“It was intentional,” Derrickson said. “I certainly took a lot of time to explore other possibilities. It wasn’t just a foregone conclusion in my mind that we would be sticking to the original. I tried looking at a lot of different possibilities, worked on a lot of different ideas with artists and just always a nagging sense that there was something right about the way the original, that there was something about this alien entity choosing a human form or being in a human form that had value even by modern standards, not by 1950 standards. I also am such a fan of the original film. You have to also just have some respect for Gort. Gort is Gort. There’s no question what we designed pays homage to the original.”

They also discuss the new film’s environmental theme:

In an interview with MTV News in March, Reeves told us that Klaatu’s message to Earth was very different from the one in the original, that he was bringing with him a warning to stop destroying the environment. Here it looks like the environment is destroying us (or Giants Stadium, at any rate) — which is it?

“It’s both and even more,” Derrickson explained. “I think that this film in some ways is an attempt to address a number of issues that are amongst the most pressing issues for the human race. The original being a Cold War film was addressing what was clearly the greatest threat for the human race at that time, mutual nuclear destruction, and that’s not the most pressing threat that we face now. It’s also man vs. man. We are destroying each other as well. Our country’s at war right now. There is certainly the issue being addressed in the movie of our treatment of one another on the planet. I think it’s a movie about human nature as much as anything else and how human nature is acting itself out in the world right now.”

Finally, they ask him about the possible religious allegory — and while they don’t mention it here, Derrickson happens to be a Christian whose previous directorial effort was The Exorcism of Emily Rose (2005), so his answer on this point is particularly interesting:

The original was a not-so-subtle allegory for Christ (the alien’s human name is Carpenter, he calls for peace, he is resurrected at the end, etc.). Is Derrickson’s version as overt?

“I don’t think you can really escape that metaphor,” Derrickson said. “I think the Christ-myth stories make great stories, whether it’s ‘The Matrix’ or ‘Braveheart,’ they all are tapping into some kind of deep myth in our DNA, and by myth I don’t necessarily mean false. I mean something that has mythological power and that’s definitely part of the story and part of what attracts me to it. My approach to that was to not discard that, but to be not quite as direct as the original.”

One fascinating thing about this is that Robert Wise, who directed the original film in 1951 (my comments), claimed he had no idea about the Christological elements in his film until other people pointed them out to him after the film was finished. So he was unintentionally overt about them, whereas Derrickson, from the sound of it, will be intentionally subtler about them.

Back when it was first announced that Scott Derrickson would direct a remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951; my comments), I asked how the message of the original film could possibly translate to the present day, given that we no longer seem to face the threat of two superpowers destroying the planet in a full-on nuclear exchange.

Rumours of an answer to my question reached my ears a while ago, but now, the star of the film, Keanu Reeves, has put it on the record himself, in an interview with MTV News. Simply put, whereas the first film had a sort of pacifist theme, the new film has an environmental theme:

“The first one was borne out of the cold war and nuclear détente. Klaatu came and was saying cease and desist with your violence. If you can’t do it yourselves we’re going to do it. That was the film of that day,” Reeves explained. “The version I was just working on, instead of being man against man, it’s more about man against nature. My Klaatu says that if the Earth dies, you die. If you die, the earth survives. I’m a friend to the earth.”

While humanity still engages in a staggering number of international conflicts, the environmental message is one that, not only encompasses wars, and fights, and terrorism, but one that goes beyond constrictions to become a millennial message of “what we are doing and who we are as a species,” Reeves insisted. “We’re trying to reach beyond the idea of [just] environmentalism.”

As it happens, this film is being produced by 20th Century Fox, and at least two of that studio’s previous blockbusters — The Day after Tomorrow (2004) and The Simpsons Movie (2007) — also dealt with environmental themes. Coincidence, or a sign of something more intentional? The studio is owned by Rupert Murdoch, who made a big deal about going green last year and vowed “to weave climate messaging into the content and programming of News Corp.’s many holdings.”

One other point to ponder: The robot Gort, who comes to Earth with Klaatu, is revealed at the end of the first film to be part of an all-powerful group of machines that are determined to enforce the galactic peace, even if it means reducing our planet to a cinder. Well, obviously they won’t be doing that in the new film. But you do have to wonder: Has the alien race represented by this movie’s Klaatu handed its autonomy over to a race of machines who are determined to protect flora and fauna, even at the expense of sentient humanoid beings like the ones who created them? Is the threat this time that artificial beings will take up arms against natural beings in defense of nature? If so, how bizarre.

UPDATE: One extra thought. In the original film, Klaatu and Gort come to Earth out of a sort of self-interest; they are concerned that humans will bring their warlike ways into space and, thus, become a threat to them. What is their motivation this time? Are they concerned that humans will spread their environmentally destructive ways to other planets, including their own? Or do they just go around policing other planets for the sake of it? I would assume that the state of affairs on our planet’s surface has no direct bearing on the environments of other worlds, and thus poses no threat to them, but this is sci-fi, so who knows.

My post last night about spotting Keanu Reeves in a local theatre got picked up by a bunch of Keanu fansites — one of which also had a link to this article at Bild.de, which covers a press conference that Will Smith gave while promoting I Am Legend in Germany.

What’s the connection? In the press conference, Smith revealed that one of his sons is making a movie with Keanu Reeves — and after a bit of snooping, I discovered that Jaden Smith, who co-starred with his dad in The Pursuit of Happyness (2006), is indeed one of the three main stars of the remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still, along with Keanu and Jennifer Connelly.

No word yet on who, exactly, he is playing, though. In the original film, the main child, played by Billy Gray, was the son of the main woman, played by Patricia Neal — but at first glance, you would not expect Jaden Smith to be the son of Jennifer Connelly. Then again, anything’s possible — remember how Jeff Goldblum had a black daughter in The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997)?

JAN 14 UPDATE: The Hollywood Reporter confirms the news, and says Smith is playing “the rebellious Jacob, the 8-year-old stepson of scientist Helen Benson (Jennifer Connelly) who first makes contact with the humanoid alien Klaatu (Keanu Reeves).”

Variety reports that Jennifer Connelly, who won an Oscar for her role in A Beautiful Mind (2001), has signed on to play the Patricia Neal character in Scott Derrickson‘s remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951; my comments), while Kathy Bates, who won an Oscar for her role in Misery (1990), is also apparently in talks for some sort of role. They join Keanu Reeves, who has not won an Oscar; he signed on to play the alien Klaatu a few months ago. The movie’s production office has already opened in Vancouver, and the film itself will be shot here between December and March.