Klaatu (Keanu Reeves) arrives on Earth via a giant sphere, triggering global upheaval in The Day the Earth Stood Still. (Twentieth Century Fox)

Based on the early, hostile reactions to the news that Twentieth Century Fox was remaking The Day the Earth Stood Still, you’d think the studio had planned to spray-paint the Mona Lisa. Sure, the original 1951 film is a certified science-fiction classic, but is it really sacrilege to want to revisit and update it? After all, that gambit has worked with other ’50s sci-fi gems — notably the 1978 remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

The Day the Earth Stood Still is another fast, loud, CGI-driven hurricane, with a reliably bloodless Keanu Reeves as the blank spot in the eye of the digital storm.

As it turns out, the purists had a reason to gnash their teeth. While the new version of The Day the Earth Stood Still isn’t execrable, it has none of the sincere urgency — or gentle humanity — of the original. It’s just another fast, loud, CGI-driven hurricane, with a reliably bloodless Keanu Reeves as the blank spot in the eye of the digital storm. The filmmakers may be fans of the source material, but they seem to have forgotten what made it work in the first place.

The 1951 film, deftly directed by Robert Wise, was a simple but effective message movie that used a UFO scenario to castigate those guilty of Cold War paranoia. Klaatu, the alien visitor, came to Earth to warn humanity to stop its nuclear brinksmanship or else yield to an interstellar peacekeeping authority — at the time, a shout-out to the efforts of the fledgling United Nations.

In the remake, generically directed by Scott Derrickson, Klaatu has gone Kyoto. Played by Reeves, the extraterrestrial emissary has arrived with an environmental ultimatum: his superior planet will no longer tolerate humankind’s polluting ways. It seems we didn’t meet our emissions targets or listen to Al Gore. Klaatu doesn’t exactly say that, but he does claim that we’ve “reached the tipping point.” (Apparently, along with acquiring a human form and a command of English, this alien has read Malcolm Gladwell.)

There are plenty of other updates — and dubious improvements — in screenwriter David Scarpa’s spin on Edmund H. North’s 1951 script. This time Klaatu arrives on Earth not in a saucer, but in a massive semi-translucent sphere that looks like a gigantic marble. Gort, Klaatu’s giant robot guard, is now several storeys high and jet black. (It’s as if the original had mated with the monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey.) And Gort’s eye beam no longer merely disintegrates weapons, it can toy with military jets and send them crashing into each other. Indeed, the remake has a destructive streak that wasn’t in the first film. While that movie’s Klaatu (played by benign British actor Michael Rennie) came in peace, Reeves’s alien is coolly violent. He uses his otherworldly powers to fry people with electricity and blast military helicopters out of the sky.

Helen Benson (Jennifer Connelly, left) and her stepson Jacob (Jaden Smith) end up assisting the alien Klaatu in The Day the Earth Stood Still. (Twentieth Century Fox)

This aggression is meant to build a character arc. Klaatu slowly loses his callous indifference to humanity after spending time with Dr. Helen Benson (Jennifer Connelly), a brilliant, widowed astrobiologist, and her preteen stepson, Jacob (Jaden Smith). When Klaatu lands in New York’s Central Park, Helen is the first human to have contact with him. Later, when he escapes interrogation at a military hospital, Helen and the reluctant Jacob assist him in his mysterious mission on Earth.

I had some hopes for Reeves as Klaatu. After all, actors of limited range have sometimes made terrific aliens — think of David Bowie in The Man Who Fell to Earth. Reeves is icily effective in the early scenes; his finely sculpted looks suggest a kind of non-human perfection. But when Klaatu is supposed to be transformed by a newfound empathy, it barely registers on the actor’s beautiful blank slate of a face. Maybe he should have played Gort instead.

Connelly, on the other hand, is all feeling as single-mom Helen, who has to deal with a resentful stepson as well as the imminent demise of the Earth. The actress spends so much time on the verge of tears that her eyeballs seem permanently red. But she and Reeves have zero chemistry, romantic or otherwise. The only credible transformation in the film comes from Smith as Jacob, a hard little kid whose surly shell finally cracks to reveal his heartbreak over the death of his soldier father in Iraq. Smith, son of Will and Jada Pinkett Smith, is a charmer, but it’s unfair to have a nine-year-old carry the movie’s emotional baggage.

For a picture with an eco message, this one wastes a lot of good supporting talent. Kathy Bates, doing an iron-lady bit as the U.S. defence secretary, struggles admirably to give depth to a shallow role. Jon Hamm (Don Draper of TV’s Mad Men), playing a government scientist, doesn’t even have time to leave an impression. All I remember are some $10 words and a nine o’clock shadow. John Cleese, meanwhile, is inexplicably cast as Prof. Barnhardt, a Nobel Prize winner for his work in biological altruism, who tries to convince Klaatu to give humanity a second chance. It’s not that Cleese isn’t convincing as an egghead, but he just can’t escape the long shadow of Python and Fawlty. (When he crosses a room, you secretly hope he’ll break into a silly walk.)

Finally, the CGI is squandered, too. The movie gives us the spectacular climax promised by its title, but it has no dramatic impact — even though the filmmakers have technical and budgetary resources far exceeding those of the 1951 version. Then again, that’s the underlying problem: while the modest original belongs to the great tradition of sci-fi as social commentary, this movie is more concerned with sci-fi as FX blockbuster. The green moral is just tagged on as a specious justification for its existence. In the end, this remake is one case of recycling that the Earth could have done without.

The Day the Earth Stood Still opens Dec. 12.

Martin Morrow writes about the arts for CBCNews.ca.