Rating summary

Movie		1.0
Video		1.5
Audio		2.0
Extras		0.0
Overall		1.0

The Day the Earth Stopped Blu-ray Movie Review

Don't stop to watch.

Reviewed by Martin Liebman May 19, 2015

Star Trek fans probably remember The Next Generation's pilot episode, the double-length "Encounter at Farpoint"," and one of its key story lines that sees the all-powerful alien "Q" tasking Captain Picard with proving humanity's worth, lest man be destroyed. That same basic premise runs through the center of the dismal The Day the Earth Stopped, knockoff studio Asylum's low budget take on The Day the Earth Stood Still (and capitalizing on the release of the remake), a film that also shares similar themes about man's destructive powers and the resultant threats to his existence from powerful extraterrestrials. The Asylum's film is, bluntly, garbage, a terrible, fully uninspiring film that's defined by a putrid script, lazy production values (it's cheaply made, too, but that's not the problem), largely disinterested acting outside of the lead, and horrible visual effects. Add a recycled story and one that plays with no flow, no emotion, and no sense of urgency, and it become easy to label this yet another dismal Sci-Fi outing from The Asylum.

A human and an alien walk down the street...

A large contingent of spaceships land on Earth. They transform into giant, unstoppable robots that no manmade weapon can destroy. Two aliens, disguised as humans, arrive at the same time and are quickly taken into military custody. One of them is a female who goes by the name "Sky" (the human word that most closely resembles her alien name). She's capable of reading minds and wields incredible, inhuman power. She forms a bond with an everyday soldier named Myron (C. Thomas Howell) with whom she shares the news: the aliens have arrived to wipe man out of the universe. Mankind has become a threat to his own world and a growing threat to nearby stars. But if Myron can somehow convince Sky that there's value in the human race, it will be spared. The clock is ticking and it's up to an Army everyman to save the world.

There's really nothing positive to say about The Day the Earth Stopped outside of complimenting C. Thomas Howell for giving an honest effort to breathe life into a character that the script tries to paint as an "everyman" thrust into the middle of a world-shaping situation. Some of his shared scenes with Sky make for passable, albeit barely, psychological and philosophical entertainment as he desperately tries to find an answer that will save humanity while lacking the communication skills, the raw knowledge necessary to form an "educated" response, and a lack of self confidence to come up with a solution. There are some interesting exchanges, not at all helped by Sinead McCafferty's stiff, monotone counter-performance as the alien Sky (albeit a script-demanded stiffness to be sure), but nothing that hasn't been done physically far better and emotionally far grander in superior Science Fiction films. The Day the Earth Stopped at least tries to inject some semblance of purpose, but even a handful of potentially strong moments cannot overcome the sheer volume of negativity and terrible moviemaking that dominate the rest of the experience.

Indeed, it's all downhill from Howell's performance, which really isn't greatly elevated above the rest of it, anyway. It would be more accurate to say that the rest of the movie follows along the same flat path through the muck of cinema's wasteland with only a few short respites along the way vis-à-vis Howell's work. The movie is amazingly putrid; it's a wonder that the filmmakers didn't actually work to make the movie this bad. On the surface, problems abound. It's astonishingly dull, flat, and lacking even a cursory sense of polish and professionalism. The film tries desperately hard to find an edge and sense of pending doom that it never can, instead stumbling through would-be "cool" and "deep" moments that come off as amateurish, not amazing. The special effects are terrible -- soft, shimmering things -- that are regularly unconvincing and inorganic. Deeper, there's no character dynamics and not even any real character introductions. Audiences are simply thrown into the movie as the aliens land, which makes the human characters nearly impossible to define considering that there's no time for even cursory exploration on a personal level away from the chaos. The movie is poorly paced, uninteresting, ugly to look at, and on and on. It may not be the worst movie ever made -- there are plenty of candidates for that distinction -- but it certainly ranks down there amongst the bottom tier.

The Day the Earth Stopped Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

The Day the Earth Stopped features a bland, completely uninspiring 1080p transfer. It's plagued by a myriad of checklist problems including aliasing (the film's soft, murky digital effects primarily), moderate to severe banding across some backgrounds, noticeable blockiness, noise, and inconsistent blacks, ranging from paleness to purpleness to crush. Baseline details are serviceable, with faces and raw clothing textures showing a few decent bits but generally suffering under the movie's flat, pasty, nondescript lower-end digital photography. Colors are dull and lack diversity; the image is almost always just a wall of solid tints, be it ugly warm, empty cool, vomit green, or dull red. To say this is anything other than an eyesore would be kind.

The Day the Earth Stopped Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Despite what The Asylum would probably like potential viewers to believe, this isn't an Action film but instead a flat, talk-heavy Drama. The Day the Earth Stopped's DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 lossless soundtrack, then, really doesn't have a lot to do, and what little there is disappoints. It's 5.1 largely in name only, lacking any kind of worthwhile surround support or rich clarity. Music is flat, deep effects are limp, and most every bit of ambience floats through the front. Dialogue is at least serviceably well defined and focused up the middle. It's truly a dull, forgettable track that gets listeners through the movie with dialogue and a few cursory effects here and there along the way.

The Day the Earth Stopped Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

This Blu-ray release of The Day the Earth Stopped contains no supplemental content. There is a "top menu" but movie playback begins upon disc insertion.

The Day the Earth Stopped Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

The Day the Earth Stopped is a miserable movie in nearly very way. It flows poorly, it looks bad, the story isn't original, the acting is putrid, the visual effects stink, and on and on. There's a decent baseline performance from C. Thomas Howell that helps make the core dynamic mildly interesting, but it gets lost in a sea of garbage filmmaking of, if not the worst, certainly the laziest, kind. Echo Bridge's Blu-ray release of The Day the Earth Stopped features bad video and audio. No extras are included. Skip it.