The Establishment of Conventions in the 1951 Science Ficiton
film The Day the Earth Stood Still, directed by Robert Wise
Arrival of the spaceship
 The spaceship set the prototype of many alien spacecraft
to come. The spaceship is a shiny, smooth silver, unmarked,
unreadable ship, like nothing on earth. Made of unknown
materials suggested a very advanced alien civilisation.
 The CODES used to introduce the spaceship are sound and
light. It sort of hums and is very bright and glows. The
sound the craft made as it moved suggested a non-human
form of energy.
 The director uses the classic ‘saucer shape’ drawing on
classic science fiction comic drawings and the recent
paranoia about the arrival of a spaceship in Roswell that
was moved to Area 51 and that the government are keeping
secret.
 There is no visible entry point.
The representation of the alien – other (appearance, manner
both Klaatu and Gort)
 Klaatu is represented as humanoid (like human) but not
human. Is masked. He wears a strange silver suit.
 Gort is incredibly tall (over 18 feet). A robot. Appears
humanoid in shape but has no eyes. Lighting (a code) is used
to represent reaction/sight. Can blast, melt and ‘disappear’
weapons (and presumably humans) with a laser (a new
technology in the 1950s and a code in the film). Appears
very threatening and made on unknown of technology.
The stock setting (Washington DC)
 The spaceship lands in Washington DC, the seat of political
power in the Unites States. It is interesting that
spaceships arrive mainly in the USA and either in
Washington or Los Angeles or in the rural hinterland of the
USA. The association with Washington is also because
Washington is perceived as a world leader nation following
WWII.
The response of the human race to the spaceship and alien
 The arrival of the spaceship is immediately perceived as
hostile. The response is militaristic. All the army and police
arrive to cordon of the spacecraft. There is panic and fear.
The stock character of the child
 Bobby Benson is the little boy that befriends Klaatu in his identity as Mr Carpenter. The
little child is a stock character in sci-fi genre and used to represent innocence, noncynicism and unfailing belief in the goodness of individuals and the universe. Commonly
the stock character of the child is a young, pre-pubescent male., partly because the
target audience for sci-films were young male teenagers and males are ‘rational’.
The stock character of the scientist
 In this film the stock character of the scientist has moved from being the ‘mad’ scientist
of Metropolis, C.A. Rotwang, to the Professor Jacob Barnhardt, who is a rational man of
science who recognises that the development of the atomic bomb is ‘science used badly’.
He is sympathetic to Klaatu and totally accepting of his outer world origins and
impressed by Klaatu’s technological and mathematical knowledge. He is not personally
motivated to gain from this relationship. Really, the scientist as a good guy not a villain.
The stock character of the female
 The token female in the film is Helen Benson, Bobby’s mother, a widow, whose husband
was a war hero. This establishes her as a moral and upstanding woman. She has a
boyfriend )(who is not very nice and very controlling) called Tom Stevens. She is
established as someone who gets rescued by Klaatu from a potentially bad marriage,
thereby setting the convention for the use of women in sci-fi films as ‘damsels in
distress’. In turn though, there is the small emergence of her as a novice heroine, as it is
she who prevents Gort from going on a rampage with the immortal words ‘Klaatu barada
nikto’.
The message and ‘bad science’

Klaatu’s message concerns the ability of the human race to now destroy itself (with
atomic weaponry). In essence his message is stop fighting amongst yourselves or we will
blow your planet away. “It is no concern of ours how you run your own planet, but if
you threaten to extend your violence, this Earth of yours will be reduced to a
burned-out cinder. Your choice is simple... join us and live in peace, or pursue your
present course and face obliteration.” He suggests human beings are childish, selfish
and irresponsible. He wants the human race to dispense with armies and the idea of
aggression. To this extent. The Day the Earth Stood Still is an anti-war film.