Professor Subrata Roy started working on his "wingless electromagnetic air vehicle" (WEAV) for NASA. The surface of the saucer-shaped craft will be covered with electrodes that, when powered by a battery or other power source, will ionize the surrounding air to create plasma. When charged with an electric current, the polarized plasma will repel the non-polarized air, creating lift and thrust. Such an aircraft would have very stable flight characteristics, with the pilot controlling it by diverting the electrical charge to different parts of the surface. Professor Roy thinks it could be scaled up to useful dimensions (his prototype will be about six inches across).

I'd check out the professor's work while you still can. He's scheduled for a visit from a couple of guys in black suits tomorrow, after which his research will be republished in a heavily redacted form. Image by: Scientific American.

The World's First Flying Saucer: Made Right Here on Earth. [Scientific American]

It's partly true, as Reeves suggested, that Klaatu comes to warn us about the way we're destroying our environment. But he's also concerned about our other naughty behavior, says Derrickson:

I think that this film in some ways is an attempt to address a number of issues that are amongst the most pressing issues for the human race. The original, being a Cold War film, was addressing what was clearly the greatest threat for the human race at that time, mutual nuclear destruction, and that’s not the most pressing threat that we face now. It’s also man vs. man. We are destroying each other as well. Our country’s at war right now. There is certainly the issue being addressed in the movie of our treatment of one another on the planet. I think it’s a movie about human nature as much as anything else and how human nature is acting itself out in the world right now.

Oh, and the Klaatu=Jesus subtext in the original film? Still very much intact.

Meanwhile, according to Derrickson, Jennifer Connelly plays Helen Benson, a Princeton microbiology professor who's drafted by the government into helping to cope with a strange occurrence. [MTV movies]

In the new version of TDTESS, astronauts aboard the space shuttle find a transparent sphere, which they bring aboard. But then it escapes from them and joins thousands of other spheres, on their way down to Earth to collect specimens of plant and animal life.

Meanwhile, we meet Helen Benson, a scientist played by Jennifer Connelly, and her whiny kid Jacob, who wants to play violent video games all the time because his father died in Iraq.

And then an enormous energy sphere lands in New York, and Keanu steps out, surrounded by American soldiers, guns at the ready. Keanu gets shot, and his pet robot comes out. But allegedly, the robot is called "The Totem," instead of Gort. It walks on all fours, shoots its destructo-ray, and then stands upright when it's done, like a totem pole. Or something.

Klaatu/Keanu goes into hospital and escapes in a military uniform. He befriends Helen and her son Jacob, and they help him meet up with Mr. Wu, another alien from Keanu's planet who has been monitoring Earth for the past 30 years. For some reason, Mr. Wu is based out of a McDonald's. And we learn that because of global warming and other environmental catastrophes, aliens have decided we're not fit to survive. So they're going to wipe out the planet.

At some point, we get the scene where everything in the world stops and chaos erupts, but supposedly it's not as cool as in the original version.

Klaatu's ship releases an energy field which nearly destroys the Earth. But the Earth survives, and Klaatu dies for some reason. As he dies, he gives a speech about how we need to change our ways if we're to survive.

Missing from the new version are Keanu calling himself Major Carpenter, the phrase "Klaatu Barada Nikto" (which Keanu swore would be in the film), the Klaatu/child interactions at the Lincoln memorial, the Arlington Cemetery and Klaatu's spaceship, and the kid witnessing Gort attacking the two guards and discovering Klaatu is an alien. And the Hugh Marlowe character. [Ain't It Cool News]

Also, note that when Gort goes into the spaceship (dig those interiors), his computer is operated by gestures. Same kind of stuff we saw depicted 55 years later as "futuristic" in Minority Report. I like Gort's computer better though — it has way more style.

Movie geeks like Peter Biskind say The Day the Earth Stood Still is a standout among cheesy 1950s movies because its humanitarian message and anti-war sentiment stood in stark contrast to the dominant political feelings of the era. In most 50s movies, the alien is the enemy and the military save humankind from evil space threats. But here, Klaatu the alien is the most heroic character and the military is depicted as misguidedly aggressive (though not entirely unsympathetic). If you haven't ever seen The Day the Earth Stood Still, now's the time before your mind is polluted by the remake starring Keanu Reeves.

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• Rhona Mitra (Boston Legal) stars in May's Doomsday as a leader of an elite military squad sent into a quarantined Scotland to find a cure for a deadly virus. [Actress Archives]
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