When will we stop fighting?
Defending your Life on The Day The Earth Stood Still
As a young Jewish kid growing up in the New York suburbs, there are a few things that are handed down as birthright. Bagels on Sunday morning and Chinese food on Sunday night. The Yankees or the Mets, depending on where your parents grew up. Filmmakers like Woody Allen, Mel Brooks and Albert Brooks. And just enough anxiety to keep the psychology industry in business for eternity.1
I could write essays and essays and essays about the artistic, flawed genius of Woody Allen2 and art vs. artist. But when I was a teenager, it was Albert Brooks who released Defending Your Life, a masterwork that explores in depth and through the kind of self-deprecating humor that appeals to a person like me, exactly what it means to be human and what it means to not just to live, but to thrive.3
For Brooks' Daniel Miller (and everyone else in Judgment City), the afterlife means literally defending his life - if the purpose of life is to overcome fear, the goal of your defense is to prove you've done so. Rip Torn as Bob Diamond in that film states it directly: "Being from Earth as you are and using as little of your brain as you do, your life has pretty much been devoted to dealing with fear." That statement is resonant - I mean, look around you.
If 1991's Defending Your Life is the gold standard of its time for films dealing with the subject of existential fear, then 1951's The Day The Earth Stood Still is the gold standard of its time for the same.
Both films present fear as humanity's defining challenge, but from opposite vantage points: Klaatu observes our fear from the enlightened perspective of an advanced civilization, while Brooks examines it from the all-too-human position of a man who never quite managed to overcome his.
Together, they bookend a forty-year conversation about whether reason can triumph over our most primal instinct.
There's been a lot of ink spilled in the last 75 years about Klaatu as a Christ figure. I'm going to steer clear of that in this essay and focus on two very specific messages that I see embedded across the film. One is about fear, which is what brought Defending Your Life to my mind - obviously. The other is the film's stark anti-war messaging, which is front and center for most of the film.
Mid-Century Modern Fears
It's worth taking a minute to talk through a few things about the film itself. One of the reasons that I love even watching films of this era is the styling. Like many other movies from this time period, the production seems quaint, even sweet. The idea that a mother would let her pre-teen son skip school to spend the day with a complete stranger who moved into their boarding house literally the night before is wild. Imagine a mother doing that in 2025.4
The visual language of the film reinforces its message at every turn. Robert Wise films Klaatu with a reverence typically reserved for spiritual figures - often from below, emphasizing his otherworldly authority. Meanwhile, the spacecraft's perfect geometric form stands in stark contrast to the chaotic human world surrounding it. Even Bernard Herrmann's theremin-heavy score doesn't simply create atmosphere - it sonically represents the gap between human emotion and alien reason.
The mannerisms and styles seem ancient to me watching this today, like a documentary for an introductory anthropology class or something. Even the dialogue seems stilted - people couldn't possibly have actually talked this way in real life.
There's something charming about all that, of course: people wearing suits and hats or dresses, addressing each other as "Mr." or "Mrs." instead of by their first name. There's a special place in my heart for mid-century modern architecture5, with its strong lines and angles. It's all very sleek. But it still seems, for lack of a better word, old.
I get the sense judging the way people behaved in real life by watching a movie from the 1960s would be like judging the way people behaved in the 1980s from Porky's.
Hiroshima, McCarthy, and Aliens
The film's 1951 release places it at a pivotal historical moment - after Hiroshima but before the hydrogen bomb, with McCarthyism on the rise and the Korean War underway. Unlike later alien invasion films made during periods of relative peace, The Day the Earth Stood Still doesn't have the luxury of treating planetary destruction as mere fantasy. When Klaatu warns of Earth's annihilation, audiences who had witnessed the mushroom cloud over Hiroshima just six years earlier understood this wasn't merely science fiction.
The proximity of this movie to WWII and the Korean War lend a certain pragmatism to the proceedings that doesn't exist in a movie like, say, Independence Day6 - a film made in a time of relative peace in the world - where people come together to fight a different kind of alien invasion and July 4th becomes Independence Day for the Earth. This turns that on its head - more Twilight Zone than Independence Day. Earth as the aggressor. It's telling that not even this visitation from outer space can bring the leaders of the nations of the earth together - only the men of science Professor Barnhardt manages to gather together from across the globe are willing to hear the message that Klaatu came to deliver: If the people of earth choose to fight themselves, it's none of the rest of the planets' concern. If they choose to extend their violent ways, they'll be destroyed because the rest of the galaxy can't risk the people of earth destroying them.
Sci-Fi Gets Serious
And what's most landmark about this isn't even its anti-war message. Casablanca had an anti-war message and that movie came out during WWII. No, the most interesting thing about this movie is that it forced the world to take sci-fi seriously7. This isn't a B movie about the thing from outer space that kills teenagers bold enough to make out at Inspiration Point or whatever that particular town called the place where teenagers drove to make out. No, this is an "A" movie, featuring talented actors - Patricia Neal was a legitimate star at this time and Michael Rennie turns in an outstanding and nuanced performance as Klaatu. And it's much more philosophical and serious than sci-fi films of the time, even if a bit heavy handed in its messaging.
And to be very clear, there's certainly nothing instinctually wrong about being afraid that beings from outer space who've landed in Washington, D.C. are coming to do something less than humane (if you'll forgive the wordplay).
Any biologist worth their salt will tell you that healthy skepticism with a huge dose of recognizing danger is one of the things that's kept the human experiment in business this long. But what happens when self-motivated or ill-intentioned individuals take advantage of that human predisposition to skepticism?
This interaction sums it up pretty well: Klaatu's quick interview with the newsman by the spaceship. It's not a throwaway exchange exactly, but it's illustrative of the overarching point the movie is trying to make:
Newsman: Would you care to say a few words, Mr. Carpenter? I suppose you're just as scared as the rest of us.
Klaatu (as Carpenter): In a different way, perhaps. I am fearful when I see people substituting fear for reason. In fact, I would...
Newsman (moving on): Uh, thank you, Mr. Carpenter. Thank you very much. I see another gentleman over here in the crowd...
Klaatu doesn't get much of his thought out before the guy moves on to someone else, but what he does get out is impactful to anyone paying attention: he's fearful when people substitute fear for reason. Which isn't just a direct reference to the problem with the way humans behave, both in general and toward one another, but is an indirect reference to why the rest of the universe turns out to be so afraid of humans: they're unreasonable.8
And what else?
The media using fear to drive ratings?
Sounds familiar.
Fear of others, fear of difference, fear of things that are unlike us driving an inability to find consensus?
Also sounds familiar.
What makes Klaatu's warning feel so urgent today isn't just its anti-war message but its diagnosis of humanity's fundamental problem: the substitution of fear for reason. In our current era of algorithm-driven fear, where media platforms profit from our anxiety and partisan divisions deepen by design, Klaatu's observation seems less like 1950s moralizing and more like prophecy.
We haven't destroyed ourselves with nuclear weapons (yet), but our inability to reason collectively in the face of planetary threats like climate change suggests we haven't evolved much since 1951.
Space, Time, and Remakes
The vastness of space is sometimes hard to grasp - an amusing side note is that Klaatu suggests that his planet is some 250,000,000 miles away, which of course sounds like a long way, but in reality, doesn't even get an Earthling to Jupiter. With current technology, it takes about three days to get to the moon, about 9 months to get to Mars and manmade objects launched in the 1970s have only recently made it out of our solar system to explore reaches of the galaxy that we can only dream of. Space is big. Really big. You won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is.9
The film was remade in 2008 with Keanu Reeves and Jennifer Connolly. It's a pale imitation of the original, of course, with the Cold War messaging of the first replaced by a fairly preachy message of environmental damage driving the destruction of earth instead of nuclear war. The issue with the newer film isn't that - there's a very strong argument to be made that the environmental changes the globe is going through pose a far greater threat to humanity than nuclear war. The issue with the film is the issue with most remakes: it's just not as compelling as the original because the story's already been told and the message has already been given.
That message is clear: when will we stop fighting?
WHERE TO WATCH
The Day The Earth Stood Still (1951)
STREAMING: Apple TV (purchase or rental), Prime Video (purchase or rental), Hoopla (free with library card)
PHYSICAL MEDIA: Available on DVD and Blu-ray, from multiple retailers
Defending Your Life (1991)
STREAMING: Available on Tubi (free with ads), Prime Video (rental), Apple TV (purchase or rental,
PHYSICAL MEDIA: Criterion Collection Blu-ray (includes interviews with Albert Brooks and restoration of deleted scenes)
I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the New York Knicks as birthright as well, given their resurgence in the mid-2020s.
I'm gonna say one thing about Woody Allen because I have to. If I hadn't watched Annie Hall before the age of 13, I would not be the person I am today. The jury is still out on whether that's good or bad.
There is so much to love about this movie, but I think the thing I love most about it is that every time I go into a restaurant and the food comes quickly, I can say "Wow, that was fast. What is this, Judgment City?", which my family never tires of.
The 2025 equivalent to this is your kid not having downtime or parental controls enabled on their iPhone.
My college campus, which at the time I went there, was almost entirely built in the 1950s and 1960s reflected this style writ large. It's since been almost entirely rebuilt, so it doesn't have the same charm, but I miss the old stuff.
One of the great mysteries and untold stories of the 1990s is Bill Pullman as a convincing leading man.
Without The Day The Earth Stood Still legitimizing serious sci-fi, we might never have gotten Star Trek's utopian vision or even John Carpenter's paranoid masterpiece The Thing. So you can thank this movie for those Yoda sheets you slept on when you were 7.
You know what else is unreasonable? That I can't find the movie PCU on any streaming service, not even for purchase.
You probably wouldn't have Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy either.