Pity the poor residents of Alpha Centauri. The studios could have chosen one of thousands of classic films to beam in their direction to give them a first taste of Earth culture: instead, what the Alpha Centaurians will be getting is a painfully insipid, Keanu Reeves-starring piece of sci-fi piffle, Variety reports.

In a Hollywood first, Twentieth Century Fox said it had used equipment at Cape Canaveral to beam The Day the Earth Stood Still, Scott Derrickson's remake of Robert Wise's 1951 classic, to the nearest star system to Earth - a transmission that will take four years.

What a shame then that the selected film is a dud - the Guardian's Peter Bradshaw has called it "a stupendously dull remake" and remarks that Reeves gives "the kind of torpid performance that lesser beings can only approximate by necking a hundredweight of Temazepam".

Other critics have been just as scathing. The venerable Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times wrote: "The Day the Earth Stood Still need not have taken its title so seriously that the plot stands still along with it." The film currently maintains a meagre 22% "fresh" rating on the review aggregate site rottentomatoes.com, suggesting that only one in five writers thought it worth stepping out for.

The film also stars Oscar-winner Jennifer Connelly as a scientist who tries to persuade Reeves' alien visitor not to destroy Earth. Cynics may suggest that extraterrestrials using The Day the Earth Stood Still to gauge whether mankind deserves to survive might possibly draw a rather different conclusion.

The film opens in UK cinemas today.