Today is Earth Day . . . and Lenin’s birthday. Red Planet finds that coincidence richly ironic.

As I pointed out to Hober in that same conversation, if you replace nuclear weapons with global warming, the movie’s entire plot collapses. In the 1951 version, the extraterrestrials are concerned that humans, who already have nukes and have demonstrated the willingness to use them, may become a threat to other worlds if they develop space travel. But with global warming, the worst we could possibly do is to kill ourselves; no threat to other worlds is conceivable.

Perhaps the ETs believe that Keanu Reeves’s acting poses a threat to the entire galaxy. I could believe that.