Of course the trend with remakes of old-school science fiction is to leave well enough alone and spend most of the budget upping the ante on the special effects, so it's with a little bit of relief that I say Scott Derrickson's remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still actually has half a brain in its head. Sure the story's essentially the same and the special effects budget has obviously been spent, but the tone here is also a more menacing one than Robert Wise's 1951 film, which points to a certain intelligence to which we're not typically accustomed in these kinds of projects.

It only makes sense. The undercurrent of the original was humankind's potential for destroying itself with weapons of mass destruction, a prospect viscerally frightening enough on its own to warrant an understated approach. This one's a bit different in its thematic conceit. Humankind's doomed because of its actions, but it's going to take Earth, one of the few planets, according to the extraterrestrial visitor here, in the cosmos capable of sustaining life, with it. In the grander scheme of things, then, we don't mean too much at all to the unsympathetic visitor.

In 1928 in India, a mountain climber (Keanu Reeves) happens upon a large glowing sphere, which knocks him unconscious, awakening to nothing on the side of the mountain. In the present day, Dr. Helen Benson, an astrobiologist at Princeton University, teaches classes and raises her stepson Jacob (Jaden Smith) on her own. Preparing dinner this night, she receives an anonymous phone call. Some people are on their way to pick her up. The matter is unknown, but she'll be prepped en route. She's whisked away to an Army facility with a collection of other scientists, where her old colleague Michael Granier (Jon Hamm) fills her in.

There's an object on a collision course with Manhattan ("Why don't we shoot down with a missile," one scientist proposes, and one almost expects the response to be, "Because that's been done too many times before."). Expecting catastrophe, the scientists arrive in Central Park to witness the spherical object, which has slowed down upon entering the atmosphere, opening to reveal a strange being. The otherworldly creature is shot (natch), defended momentarily by a giant robot from the ship, rushed to a military facility for treatment, and reveals itself to be a humanoid with a command of the English language named Klaatu (Reeves).