The eerie premise of the 1956 Invasion of the Body Snatchers has never faded from our cultural awareness. Jack Finney’s story is philosophical Sci-fi that taps fundamental insecurities: the slightest change to what we perceive as normal can completely unnerve us. When Virginia Christine says ‘my father isn’t my father any more,’ we feel her distress. If we can’t define who we in our own family, how can we be sure of anything around us?
The ‘Pods R Us’ cult never went away, and in fact has succeeded.
The creeping paranoia of Don Siegel’s original never stopped chilling audiences. In 1978 it became the first 1950s Sci-fi classic to merit an official remake. Philip Kaufman and W.D. Richter’s updated re-do got extra points for maintaining credibility in a new era, in a more complex urban setting. Abel Ferrara’s third iteration in 1993 flattened the menace by comparing the Pod takeover to the regimentation and conformism already present in modern military life. The story was too familiar, but the personal dimension engaged. Critic Roger Ebert, for some reason, wrote that he thought Ferrara’s version was the best.
The fourth film iteration of Jack Finney’s The Body Snatchers is a big budget replay with an emphasis on elaborate run-and-hide action thrills. Now called simply The Invasion, it has pretty much everything going for it commercially except A Reason To Be; for most of its running time, we are ahead of the story, waiting for something surprising to happen. When the teary-eyed Veronica Cartwright wails that her husband is not her husband, we really want Nicole Kidman’s psychiatrist to say, ‘don’t be silly, we’ve both seen that movie.’ The polished production hits the exact same story points as the other remakes, changing particulars but adding little to the concept. For much of the audience the basic story was as familiar as Little Red Riding Hood. We assumed that the film would go in some new direction, or bring a fresh wrinkle to the surface.
A space shuttle explodes during re-entry, scattering debris over half the nation. Washington D.C. psychiatrist Carol Bennell (Nicole Kidman) is confused by some odd developments. Her ex-husband, CDC official Tucker Kaufmann (Jeremy Northam), after ignoring his son Oliver (Jackson Bond) for years, suddenly wants a visit with him. At work, Carol’s patient Wendy Lenk (Veronica Cartwright) is convinced her husband has ‘changed.’ A friend comes down with a strange flu that’s ‘going around.’ When Carol hears that a dinner guest (Roger Rees) of her social-elite friends the Belicecs (Josef Sommer & Celia Weston) has been stricken with a weird illness, she contacts her closest confidante, doctor Ben Driscoll (Daniel Craig).
An invasive alien organism brought to earth by the space shuttle has begun a massive takeover of humanity. The ‘possessed’ Tucker uses his CDC post to spread the alien virus faster via a bogus flu vaccine. Ben and his scientist friend Dr. Stephen Galeano (Jeffrey Wright) have barely begun to study the little slips of alien protoplasm found on victims, when Carol finds herself in the center of a city under assault. It’s a mass conspiracy of ‘transformees’ that exhibit dulled emotions and are intent on infecting the entire population. Going undetected is not easy; transformed children are particularly good at spotting people attempting to ‘Pass for liberated.’
Dodging detection on the street, Carol races to find Oliver and take him to safety. The transformation happens when one falls asleep, but Oliver has slept and is still unaffected, still ‘himself.’ Dan and Stephen seize on this as useful information in formulating a vaccine against the alien plague.
We have to assume that star Nicole Kidman signed onto the Invasion project with more in mind than an ordinary Sci-fi action picture about fighting aliens or dodging zombies. Kidman also may have been instrumental in importing the director Oliver Hirschbiegel, the maker of the celebrated international hit Downfall. Somewhere during post-production, Hirschbeigel lost control of his picture. New scenes were written by Lilly and Lana Wachowski, and directed by James McTeigue, of V for Vendetta.
The long delay before release and industry buzz tipped off audiences that the movie was ‘troubled,’ and the entertainment media smelled blood in the water. At just 99 minutes in duration, the show moves fast and concentrates on action. Just a couple of reels into the picture the crisis has already reached the level depicted at the conclusion of the 1956 original, and the film becomes an extended chase. Carol’s main challenge is to cross town without being arrested by infected cops, or surrounded by an infected mob. She meets other ‘uninfecteds’ doing the same thing. To ‘pass,’ she must put on an emotionless mask, and not avoid eye contact.
Most of the ‘possessed’ citizens are well played, as passive-looking yet focused on completing the alien conquest. But a few are given to weird stares and monotone voices, the too-familiar cliché remembered from vintage alien possession movies. But we’re surprised that Nicole Kidman’s Carol isn’t caught right away. Even when playing possum, she continually telegraphs her inner anxiety.
To better play that hide-and-seek game more scenes were needed with people like the uninfected street cop, who advises Carol to stop sweating and zone out, if she wants to avoid becoming an alien zombie. We also like the business with young Oliver’s possessed friend (or half-brother?). The child easily identifies Carol as a faker, even as she fools the adults. Not so original is the old notion that dogs intuit an ‘evil’ presence, a given as far back as the alien possession drama I Married a Monster from Outer Space.
The emphasis on action results in a slick but mechanical thriller, that loses interest as we realize that the movie has nothing to say. Constant ‘media break’ news flashes update the progress of the crisis, with the news anchors stressing the need to get the CDC’s ‘vaccine.’ The last reel is clogged with ‘radio’ dialogue, like “Hurry, they’re catching up to us!” The editors may have collapsed the continuity, removing whole scenes and abbreviating action set pieces, like Carol’s narrow escape on a crowded subway train. One editorial experiment is very disruptive. In a dialogue clinch, Carol and Dan discuss getting a car and racing across town. While they continue to talk, flash-forwards begin cross-cutting that same action. The shots of one scene are mixed into shots of the next, the way a card dealer shuffles cards.
Carol knows she’s been infected and is terrified that she’ll fall asleep and be undergo the expected metamorphosis in a web of gooey fungus. She frequently thinks about the alien virus growing within her, which motivates CGI-animated micro-flurries of churning, mutating viruses. They’re little more than eye-candy agitation. To prep viewers for the occasional spontaneous montage disruption, the movie proper begins with a quickie blizzard of fast-cut, flash-forwarded montage mayhem. It is only a few seconds in duration, and over before we know what we’re looking at.
The least convincing part of the show is Dan and Stephen’s valiant test tube battle against the alien organism. A series of cutaway scenes show Stephen jumping on Dan’s suggestions, and instantly diagnosing exactly what they’re up against. We never see the super-lab that produces the anti-virus agent they develop, but they manage to isolate, synthesize, mass produce and deliver it literally overnight. We can imagine audiences laughing out loud, when Jeffrey Wright’s doctor tells the press that ‘it was easy.’ Ms. Kidman’s ‘serious’ Sci-fi thriller is resolved in a quick-fix defeat of aliens with microbiological ‘magic.’
Instead of plumbing the body-snatch concept for new insights, The Invasion doubles down on the same alien prosyletizing as the original: ‘stop resisting, you’re just making things harder on yourself.’ Carol flees her pursuers in hairy car chases, and the movie becomes just another Sci-fi action show, albeit with fewer guns. Carol races her car through downtown Baltimore with twenty infecteds hanging on. What should be a truly hairy stunt comes off as ho-hum: the bar for movie action scenes has already been set much higher than that.
The big finish of the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers delivered the paranoid revelation that The Pods Have Already Won, which in 1956 was a conceptual mind-blower. Kaufman’s 1978 version succeeded with its horrifying gut-kick from Donald Sutherland, a classic freeze-frame finale. By contrast, The Invasion’s Big Finish is an uninspiring action scene, a rush to meet a rescue helicopter.
Those judgments aside, the performances in The Invasion are very good. Ms. Kidman holds our attention at all times, delivering everything needed and more. Jeremy Northam (Mimic, Gosford Park) plays the possessed ex-husband with restraint and finesse. Daniel Craig would proceed directly to his career-topping stint as James Bond 007, although the delay for the Invasion re-tool would cause Casino Royale to be released first. We wish that Veronica Cartwright’s role were bigger, but she’s certainly effective. Jackson Bond can’t be complimented enough as Carol Bennell’s precocious son. He’s natural, non-cloying, and not a hateful little jerk like Jaden Smith in the disposable remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still. Other support is fine, with Jeffrey Wright (Ride with the Devil) doing thankless exposition duty as the all-knowing scientist. He’d become Daniel Craig’s Felix Leiter in 3 Bond films.
Was director Oliver Hirschbiegel not the best choice to guide a new version of this American semi-classic? Hirschbiegel brought along his cameraman and editor for a big American movie that did not launch him as an A-list Hollywood director. The disc extras drop hints as to ‘what went wrong’ with the movie. We still wonder if a substantially different director’s cut is out there somewhere.
Spielberg’s excellent War of the Worlds remake indulged in some subversive sniping against the Iraq war. The Invasion follows suit, mentioning Bush and the war a few more times. The ‘infected’ media reports that traditional hostilities around the world are ending, because the new ‘homogenized’ humanity no longer has any need to fight amongst itself. Around Carol’s breakfast table, we get a 21st-century version of a Dickens finale, but we can’t tell if its cynicism is intentional. Instead of ‘God Bless Us Every One,’ the perplexing message delivered is, ‘Thank God we’re human again — our species is once again free to pursue its mindless, suicidal orgy of violence, war and atrocity.’
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