Warning: Spoilers for The Day the Earth Stood Still ahead. I highly suggest that you watch it; it can be found on Netflix.
"Klaatu barada nikto," Helen tells Gort, panicked. The 8-foot-tall robot stops suddenly, carries Helen inside the saucer, and departs to find Klaatu. When Gort returns, he lays Klaatu's body in a kind of bed, restoring Klaatu's life.
This jumble of nonsense words describes the climactic scene of The Day the Earth Stood Still, and one of the most famous scenes in all of science fiction.
The alien Klaatu and his robotic bodyguard Gort have touched down in Washington, D.C., in a prototypical flying saucer. Their arrival is not a pleasant one; Klaatu is shot almost immediately by an overeager soldier, and is rushed to the nearest hospital. While there, the Secretary of Defense visits him. Klaatu tells the secretary that he has an urgent message for all of the world leaders to hear; the secretary, of course, recognizes that this is impossible with the divide between the USA and USSR. Klaatu resolves to go undercover as Mr. Carpenter to find out more about this strange, divided planet.
Already, the film is reacting to the seemingly senseless divisions of the burgeoning Cold War, and this reaction only grows stronger as the film progresses. Klaatu/"Mr. Carpenter" finds himself in the care of a woman named Helen, her husband Tom, and their young son Billy. Billy shows him Arlington cemetery, where he is surprised at the number of humans killed in wars. Again, the film comments on the deep divisions possible among humans, and their costly toll, pointing out the seeming pointlessness of it all.
The Day the Earth Stood Still saves most of its sociopolitical commentary for the end, though. After Klaatu is killed by a soldier and subsequently resurrected (in a not-so-subtly Christlike manner), he delivers his urgent message to a gathering of some of the world's top scientific minds: now that Earth has developed nuclear weapons, it poses a threat to other planets, and must disarm itself or face annihilation.
While Klaatu spoke of interplanetary danger, lines such as "There must be security for all, or no one is secure" make it clear that he speaks of nuclear proliferation on one planet only: Earth.
Out of all of the film's message, the sentiment expressed in this final speech was by far the most timely. In 1949, the USSR conducted its first successful weapons test. US President Harry S. Truman, after learning of the weapons test via covert surveillance of the USSR, announced its success to the world on September 23rd of the same year. The test immediately prompted calls for thermonuclear weapons tests, sparking the Cold War.
The Day the Earth Stood Still was written, filmed, and released in 1951, only two years later. It reflected the frustration of the American populace at even more senseless conflict after two massive wars, and offered a fragile vision of hope in its final moments.
The successful test of a hydrogen bomb was carried out in 1952, shattering this hope.
It interesting to think about conflict from an outsider's (an alien's) perspective. I feel as though we as humans are so used to conflict and divide that we accept it as the norm. This made me imagine myself as someone from another planet, and I wonder how I would view our world.
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