At the beginning of Robert Wise's 1951 sci-fi classic "The Day the Earth Stood Still," a flaying saucer lands in Washington, D.C. and a stern, masked alien named Klaatu (Michael Rennie ...

But "The Day the Earth Stood Still" is a notable exception to the general run of outer-space productions. Most of the recent science fiction movies have been involved with trick celestial ...

The Day the Earth Stood Still uses a seemingly impossible fiction to illuminate the dangerous absurdities of everyday assumptions by a world poised on the brink of mass suicide. When an alien ship ...