(2008) Here's another example, like War of the Worlds, in which a sci-fi classic gets trashed, transformed into just another action movie with plenty of pyrotechnics with an uninspired score. Director Scott Derrickson and screenwriter David Scarpa have revamped Edmund H. North's screenplay, giving Klaatu (Keanu Reeves) awesome powers such that rather than his being vulnerable and dependent on Dr Helen Benson (Jennifer Connelly), this time an astrobiologist concerned with theories of extraterrestrial life, the fate of planet's people must rely on her changing his heart and mind.

"This planet is dying," Klaatu tells her: "The human race is killing it." Suddenly realizing his actual intentions, after he'd initially told her "I'm a friend to the Earth," - "You came to save the Earth from us" - she pleads: "We can change. We can still turn things around." He disagrees: "We've watched, we've waited and hoped that you would change…. It's reached the tipping point."

Eighty years earlier in the mountains of India, a mountain climber encountered an icy sphere, which took a sample of tissue from his hand; that skin sample's DNA became the genesis of Klaatu, who arrives on Earth in a huge spheroid, traveling at 3 x 107 meters per second (18,640 miles per second or one tenth the speed of light). Landing in Manhattan (at first scientists think the impact will sterilize the planet), the spheroid attracts the attention of the military and spectacle-seeking civilians, while Dr Benson is summoned to join a group of scientists.

In the confusion as an alien steps forth - a soldier requests rules of engagement - Dr Benson approaches the creature just before a bullet strikes it. The violence attracts a giant robot, who begins to destroy the forces arrayed against the spacecraft, until the alien commands: "Klaatu, barrada, nikto," freezing the automaton.

At the hospital the surgeon operates on the wounded creature, describing how the gray-flesh outer layer peels away, like a placental covering, revealing a human body. Speaking English, Klaatu says: "This body will take some getting used to." Dr Benson asks: "What were you before you were human?" "Different," he replies: "It would only frighten you."

In Washington, DC, as reports arrive of other, smaller spheres landing all over the Earth and the nation's computer network having been compromised, Secretary of Defense Regina Jackson (Kathy Bates) says in alarm: "They know everything about us now." Making analogies with what happened to the Incas and North American Indians upon encountering advanced civilizations, Sec Jackson tells her audience that this time "the less advanced civilization is us." Eventually she will realize that the spheres are like miniature arks, collecting species across the globe.

Helen is also the stepmother of an African-American preadolescent boy Jacob (Jaden Smith, actor Will Smith's son) whose father was killed a year earlier and biological mother died when he was an infant; he's angry and defiant. Unlike Bobby in the original movie, Jacob takes an immediate dislike to Klaatu, who has escaped from the authorities with Helen's assistance: "We shouldn't be helping him." (Many viewers, including myself, take an immediate dislike of the obstinate, obstreperous kid.)

After discussing in Mandarin Earth's prospects with an elderly Asian man (another alien who has lived among people for 70 years) at a McDonalds, Klaatu comes away convinced that humans are "not a reasonable race" but a destructive one. Helen insists that he see Dr Karl Thomas Barnhardt (John Cleese), recipient of a Nobel Prize for biological altruism, before deciding to carry out his plan to eliminate human beings.

As Klaatu makes a correction on the chalkboard (the mathematics - the effects of quantum gravity on the "Big Rip" - displayed is more sophisticated than in the original: "The Big Rip refers to the possibility that galaxies, stars, planets and atoms would be ripped apart and their parts accelerate away from each other at ever-increasing speeds due to the 'dark energy' in the universe," according to this article, Prof Barnhardt enters the room and joins in trading equations: "I have so many questions to ask you."

Dr Barnhardt attempts to alter Klaatu's dark view of humans - "But it's only on the brink that people find the will to change. Only on the precipice do we evolve" - but it will take a change of heart more than a rational argument to convince the alien. Meanwhile, the robot - which the military has given the acronym GORT for Genetically Organized Robotic Technology - releases a swarm of ravaging, self-replicating insect-like nanites.

In this remade version of the sci-fi movie the question of God's existence or absence during a planetary catastrophe never arises, though Muslims are shown praying in the Middle East. The existence of civilizations far more advanced than those found on Earth isn't treated in the plot; the futility of Christianity and all other religions in the face of an existential threat to humanity's survival isn't addressed.

The alien Klaatu, who has superhuman powers, attempts to console young Jacob, still mourning the loss of his father a year afterward, saying he can't bring the boy's dad back to life: "The universe wastes nothing. Everything is transformed."

After the world leaders refuse to cooperate with Klaatu's efforts to confront them with their dilemma of destruction, the strategies in the 1951 classic and its makeover diverge. One might argue that the initial political events depicted in both movies might be interpreted as a dramatic demonstration of Jean-Paul Sartre's atheistic existentialist point of view. "Since there is no God, there cannot be a 'we-subject' of all world citizens, observed Sartre," writes Wilfrid Desan in The Tragic Finale: "The idea of the 'we-subject' appears only when the Third man emerges. In the absence of God, therefore, humanity is unable to form a complete coalition and all attempts to assemble the whole of humanity is an inevitable failure."

However, in the original version, an assembly of scientists, led by Prof Barnhardt (a stand-in for Einstein) seems to be humanity's only hope for salvation. The Third man we might take to be Klaatu in place of Christ; after all, he is resurrected from the dead and refers to "the creator of all things," implying a universal, monotheistic faith.

Nonetheless, even with regard to the more secular 2008 movie, Desan's critique of Sartre seems to apply: "It is obvious that Sartre's argumentation is not convincing. There is no reason why atheists [or agnostics] cannot tend toward some sort of world union [as did Einstein]. In fact, they do. Several of them tend toward some form of humanistic ideal where concern for brotherhood and for moral and material welfare of all human beings replaces faith in an invisible deity."

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