Title: The Day the Earth Stopped
MPAA: Unrated
Runtime: 90 minutes
Director: C. Thomas Howell

Rating: 1 out of 5 stars

The Day the Earth Stopped (The Asylum Home Entertainment, 2008) should not be confused with the similarly named The Day the Earth Stood Still. The latter film describes the day in which the earth ceased to move, whereas the former film describes the day in which the earth just ... stopped. I'm not sure exactly what it stopped doing; that's anyone's guess.

The plot is beautifully simple. Aliens invade the earth with the intention of destroying it, because this little planet of ours poses some generic, unspecified threat to the universe. The aliens, of course, land in the United States of America. Not China, not Germany, not Africa, or any other number of equally logical choices - no, the aliens always ultimately center on the USA.

Ah, but wait! There is a plot twist! One of the aliens, who takes the flaming hot form of Sinead McCafferty (Days of Our Lives, Street Racer), has been sent as a kind of ambassador, to discover if there is indeed value in human life. If the Vaguely Employed as an Officer of Some Government Agency hero-type guy can convince the sensitive alien ambassador that humanity has value, then the attack will be called off. Apparently, this highly-advanced alien race (which can read minds, restore life, and harness the power of Life Force in general) sucks at reconnaissance, and determined to destroy the planet without doing the necessary initial leg-work.

In other words, the aliens want to destroy earth (by making it "stop") because earth has become a cosmic threat; however, if the earthlings can show that there's something warm and gooey in the center of this thing called Human Existence, then the aliens will continue allowing the earth to drain its sweaty, sebaceous, epidermal secretions into the Universal Hot-tub.

I thought it made great sense.

The only thing that stops in this movie is the script. There are incredibly long spans of time in which nothing is said, no dialog is spoken, and Spielbergian levels of looking are achieved. I treated these moments as wonderfully welcome periods of relief, and learned to look forward to them.

Let me just cut to the moral message of the movie and spare you the time you would otherwise waste watching this movie: stop being a threat to the other planets, ok, Earth? We need to live in harmony with each other, yes, but also with the entire cosmos. What it is we might possibly be doing wrong on this front isn't exactly clear, since we've never actually made contact with alien life, but rest assured: when whatever we're doing wrong gets to be too much for the rest of the universe to put up with, The Alien Police will certainly let us know, and will probably kill us all. Don't say you weren't warned.

(PS - Sinead McCafferty grants the audience an extended and completely gratuitous view of her pillowy, large, be-nippled breasts, and she is courteous enough to do so before the viewer gets even three minutes into the film. Depending on your POV, this either semi-redeems the movie, or only tarnishes it further. Again, you've been warned.)