The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951)

30 years before Steven Spielberg made E.T., Patricia Neal originated the archetype of a single mother who discovers her son is spending too much time with an alien. “Sci-fi Mom” can be found in the retro animated Iron Giant, and also in Spielberg’s classic masterpiece Close Encounters of the Third Kind. What’s the pattern here? Are fatherless boys more likely to attract aliens because they look for a father in every stranger…? Perhaps over mothering has left the boys gullible and needy, susceptible to the influence of dominating spacemen…. Maybe it’s just because if left unsupervised, boys will get into all kinds of trouble…. Ugh, what’s a single mom to do!

Although an undisputed classic, The Day the Earth Stood Still is a product of its time. It was made in the paranoid Eisenhower-era of wise old scientists and panic-stricken mobs, when suddenly a messianic alien named Klaatu lands in Washington DC (the center of the universe in 1951) with his robot enforcer Gort. Klaatu (née Mr. Carpenter, née Jesus the Christ) delivers a message of universal peace — OR ELSE! He explains that the worlds he represents haven’t so much solved their differences as made violence illegal, enforced by a race of Gorts who will immediately destroy any aggressor. His peace message is actually a warning: Kill each other all you want here on Earth, but if your wars spread to other worlds the Gorts will get you.
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