Thanks to director Robert Wise and his phenomenal hit, The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), the words “Klaatu Barada Nikto” became part of the pop culture vernacular of the 1950s and is one of the most famous science fiction commands in history. Sure, we don’t know what the heck it means. Well, not exactly. The alien, Klaatu, instructs Helen Benson to speak the command to his robot, Gort, should Klaatu come to harm. It results in Gort retreiving the corpse of Klaatu and bringing it back to life.
That’s just a sample of the vast buffet of interesting things in this classic sci-fi flick.
The image of a sleek, silver-colored flying saucer invading the landscape of the nation’s capitol was seared into the minds of that generation of Americans. In fact, the film was a thinly-veiled metaphor for the story of Jesus Christ. Klaatu, the alien ambassador to planet Earth, is quickly shot by humans who don’t understand him or his mission. Desiring to save the world from itself, he chooses to walk among the common people, taking the name “Carpenter”.
He knows that global disaster is the fate of the human race if it does not change its ways. Carpenter decides to grab the attention of the world’s population by temporarily shutting down the planet’s power grid (except for planes in flight and essential services). But the paranoid and hyper-militarized humans become even more recalcitrant.
Faced with a stubborn resistance to alter their course, Klaatu gives the Earthlings one grim, final warning…
