"I've come to save the Earth." As Sylvester Stallone is to repulsion, Keanu Reeves is to deformed nihilism and acerbic motivation. A repeat of a now-20-year-old running joke, stoner / adventurer / pet Reeves comes back down to metro New York in The Day the Earth Stood Still, risking everything, subtracting himself from the emancipatory normality of alien dominance to attain spectral consciousness fueled by excellent evolutionary altruism. Not at all reckless, iniquitous, or revolutionary, though monotone and slightly bulbous like an unpredictable Rod Serling ensconsed in knock-off Prada, Reeves reflects the status-quo-mongering majority down on the street. "Where are we going?" No way. I guess so. Fantastic! Earth is therein implicitly and really fucked, devoid of message (except it's sort of mankind at bottom and to blame), violent forever, and retroactively inarticulate as a coordinate, since Reeves has no place to go now, having never before taken on an impurely ad hoc humanist-passivist role, and so not getting to pass Go, not getting quite to collect $200. "It's interesting that mid-December turns out to be a nice time to release summer-style action movies," Reeves projects, looking down on the collapsed bug life and geomancy of a positive vision and natural voice. "I've got to get back to the city." Why bother, Buddha imitator? Struggling to survive as he does, a hulk and mimic to Boardwalk packed with hotels along with Park Place, everything subject to foreclosure? What worked for Reeves in the 1990s and the early 2000s pertains, he's for rent, perennially cantilevered sexually, still no green card.