The Invasion (2007) --- A Review with Stray Thoughts

Directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel

Based on Body Snatchers (novel) by Jack Finney
Starring Nicole Kidman, Daniel Craig, Jeremy Northam and Jeffrey Wright.

Reviewed by Junior

I love the Body Snatchers premise. There have been four movies based on Jack Finney's book, and I've enjoyed them all. I'm sure Hollywood would have just made sequels if they could, but the structure of the story would make that very difficult.

• Jack Finney also wrote a wonderful time travel book called Time and Again. Fanciful and romantic and above all else well researched, this book is, among other things, a fascinating travelogue of New York City during the early 1900's, replete with lots of photos. Uses the no-tech time travel method borrowed for the sappily romantic Somewhere in Time.

The first adaptation, of course, was the black-and-white Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) directed by Don Siegel. The second, and best, version was Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978), directed by the fabulous Phillip Kaufman and starring Donald Sutherland, Jeff Goldblum, and Brooke Adams. After that they started changing up the name. There was Body Snatchers (1993), directed by Abel Ferrarra with Meg Tilly and Forest Whitaker, set mostly on an army base. Now we have the other half of the title, The Invasion, starring the always lovely and talented Nicole Kidman.

• The star of the 1956 original, Kevin McCarthy, has a cameo in the 1978 version as the crazy man warning of doom on the street.
  

• Veronica Cartwright, who has raised stressed-out panic to an art form in itself, is in both the 1978 Invasion of the Body Snatchers and this new one.
  

Kidman plays Dr. Carol Bennell, a psychiatrist in Washington, D.C., a single mom who dispenses pills to make people feel better. This "feel better" aspect is important in the film because---unlike previous incarnations of Body Snatchers---this movie is not an allegory about creeping Communism, or some other group or movement; it is a heavyhanded rumination on the violence and discord of mankind and what price we might be willing to pay to all live in peace, as one. This drum is beaten repeatedly and loudly throughout the movie. Couldn't they have made this alien threat a metaphor for Scientologists?

• Kidman looks hot in a thin tee shirt and diaphanous white pajama bottoms 5 minutes into the movie, getting her son's breakfast ready. I've always found her surprsingly sexy, despite her being thin and pale, not my usual type, as well as a terrific actress. I first noticed her in Dead Calm, before she had hooked up with the dwarfish Cruise.
• I am one of only 7 people in the world who liked Eyes Wide Shut.
  

Dr. Bennell's child, I guess, is intended to add an original twist to the Body Snatchers dynamic. Her need to save him is her motivating force, therefore the boy is placed in jeopardy constantly throughout the film, which never works for me. I can suspend my disbelief when the star of the movie is in peril, even though I know in the vast majority of Hollywood movies he/she will be fine, but when a child's put in jeopardy---I can count on one finger the number of times in a major movie where a child actually dies or has something irreversibly terrible happen to them. Didn't work for me in Aliens either, despite loving everything else about it.

Hunky Daniel Craig plays Kidman's love interest, Dr. Ben Driscoll. Amazingly, she wants to "just be friends," obviously not having seen him yet as James Bond, which makes him completely irresistible to just about every woman on the planet, who will immediately flop onto their backs in his presence. One of Driscoll's scientist co-workers is the incomparable Jeffrey Wright, completely wasted here.

• Daniel Craig and Jeffrey Wright also appear together in the Craig's first two bond films, Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace. Wright has assumed the role of CIA agent Felix Lighter, who, in previous incarnations of Bond films was sometimes white, sometimes black, and got his legs eaten off by sharks.
  

The seed pods seen in the previous three incarnations of Body Snatchers are here replaced by microscopic spores which are disseminated when an infected person hocks up a big green loogie. This is effective because the viscous snot can be put into drinks to infect people, or, when the snatched feels particularly aggressive, just projectile vomited in someone's face. This serves the dual purpose of dispensing with the need to cart around huge seed pods and put them in beds with people while they sleep and making the movie more actiony.

Unfortunately, action is not what I want from a Body Snatchers flick. The slow, creeping menace of these pod people who walk and talk and look human, but are strangely deadpan and lifeless, has always been the threatenting thing in these films. That, paired with the wonderful conceit that if you don't want to be assimilated you have to stay awake has always been the most effective aspect of these films. Sleep---which you can only put off so long. It's a very compelling device because we've all been there at some point, whether it was when you were driving, strung out from taking care of a new baby or cramming for an exam, we all know what that feels like and that, ultimately, sleep will win.

• Avoiding sleep, of course, is also one of the important aspects of A Nightmare on Elm Street, and equally effective in that movie. In the first one, before the series decided Freddy was a great comedian, the nightmare was truly terrifying.

The creepy tension you usually expect in a Body Snatchers adaptation gives way to power walking and molotov cocktails and helicopters in the end, unfortunately. I know modern screewriting dictates that the last third of the movie needs to ramp up the action, but it doesn't work for some films and leaves me cold here. Add to that the fact that this movie uses a deus ex machina (literally) when the proper ending for a Body Snatchers movie is one of defeat for our protagonists, and you've got a heavyhanded film with very little real tension and three good actors wasted.

Look---5
Acting---6
Story---3