There are plenty of things you probably already know going into this picture. Yes, it’s a remake of the 1951 anti-nuke sci-fi classic by Robert Wise. Yes, it concerns the arrival of Klaatu, an alien herald with some advice for the human race. And yes, he’s got a killbot. A really big killbot.

Apparently, the various civilizations that employ Klaatu have been watching us for a while, they have some concerns about the direction we’re driving our big blue marble, and so dispatch him to greet us with a message of world peace. Sounds pretty swell, until one determines that when he uses the term “world,” he specifically means the planet Earth, and the “peace” part is not so much about burying political hatchets or buying local products or helping the landlady with her garbage, but a lot more about purging the human infection from the planet’s surface so it can get back to the business of growing trees and squids and ocelots unhindered. You know, in peace. Oh, and by the way, meet my colossal killbot.

The military’s first response, naturally enough, is to shoot the messenger. After taking one square in his human suit’s chest, he’s trundled off to an underground lab for interrogation and is aided by Helen Benson (Jennifer Connolly), a comely astrobiologist, in his escape. After an impressively taut and well paced initial act, the film takes this opportunity to devolve into a fairly standard fugitive drama, avoiding Humvees and helicopters while touring about the woods of upstate New York with Helen’s stepson in tow.

It’s kind of a shame, because otherwise—and if you can get past Keanu’s chronic laconic line delivery (his Klaatu is an absolute fun sponge, but we’re thankfully spared any of his traditional “whoa-ments”)—there’s every indication that some serious thought went into this update. The characters and their relationships have strong allegorical underpinnings, each clearly representing elements of the greater concept. There’s a direct correlation between Klaatu’s mission and the relationship between Helen and her upstart preteen boy (played with some authenticity by Jaden “son of Will” Smith). Just as humankind must appear to the more advanced off-world factions, he’s maybe a little too smart for his own good and something of a bastard, ruthlessly taunting his mom and  thumbing his nose at every sign of authority. With a few nicely placed moments (like one where he claims his late father’s razor as his own) the boy also shows some distinct signs of burgeoning maturity. The care and hope that Helen shows him even as he’s acting out eventually translate nicely to Klaatu’s vision of humanity’s potential, and the slow turn around of his opinion during his exposure to them makes a whole lot of narrative sense.

Also, the film is positively dripping with religious implication, not least of which is indicated by the return of a judgmental, messianic figure with apocalypse on the brain, but also specifically in the newly reimagined killbot GORT (now more than just a goofy name, but a goofy acronym for “Genetically Organized Robotic Technology”), which bursts apart into a billion corrosive self-propagating nano-GORTs, commencing the Earth scrubbing with every appearance of a swarming plague of locusts. It’s all very Old Testament. At one point, the writers tip their cards unnecessarily far, directly referencing arks and floods. It’s judgement day. We get it, already.

This “The Day the Earth Stood Still” is not great, but it aspires to greatness, taking rare care to reflect on culture and character and consequence while presenting some suitably post-singularity technologies (even handing us a few eggheads to explore them, whose explanations are amusingly summed up mostly by saying, “We don’t know how this thing works”). It may not be a terrific film, but in the end, at least it stands as good responsible science fiction.