For a story that has been remade as much as Jack Finney’s The Body Snatchers, it’s had a surprisingly high rate of success. Don Siegel’s 1956 original, Invasion Of The Body Snatchers, is an undisputed, stone-cold classic and Phillip Kaufman’s trippy, 1978, remake is even better, adding some truly nightmarish imagery to an already tense scenario. Even Abel Ferrara’s 90s attempt, Body Snatchers, added a concise, to-the-point edge to proceedings by scaling back matters and confining it to a military base.
However, in 2007, filmmakers decided to take yet another punt at this world of emotion draining spores and paranoia with the simply titled The Invasion, an updated version that pitted Nicole Kidman and a newly minted James Bond, Daniel Craig – however, it seems that the unbroken steak of the Body Snatcher had finally run out with reviews for Oliver (Downfall) Hirschbiegel’s attempt being less than glowing. Did intrusive reshoots directed by James McTeigue and overseen by the Wachowski Siblings only succeed in over writing the movie’s original personality or was this fourth Invasion doomed from the start?
After a space shuttle crashes back to earth, it manages to scatter its debris far across the United States of America in the form of jagged chunks of metal – however, tetanus is the least of the health and safety worries as a space born spore attached to the fragments has something of a worrying effects on those who come in contact with it. Basically, once you’re infected with the spore, it takes over your body and mind after a good night’s sleep, after which you literally wake up a new man – or woman – or whomever.
One of the first victims is Tucker Kaufman, a director of the CDC, whose ex-wife happens to be Carol Bennell, a psychiatrist who is starting to notice an alarming pattern with patients worrying that their loved ones are no longer behaving as usual. Things take an even creepier turn when Bennell’s son, Oliver, finds a weird patch of translucent “skin” while trick or treating that she gets her friend, Dr. Ben Driscoll, to get it analysed, but matters may already be too far along to make any difference.
As more and more emotionally blank carriers start to outnumber normal people, the invasion starts to gather momentum with people being bodily dragged off the streets by inhuman police officers. However, while matter on the ground are getting evermore frantic, the newspapers and television are reporting peace is literally spreading across the globe as this alien invasion has not need for our petty wars.
However, on the ground, Carol, Oliver, Ben and other furiously fight in order to preserve their humanity as this insidious, yet perversely beneficial epidemic rumbles ever on.
Right from the get go, it’s apparent that time has been surprisingly kind to the most maligned version of this tale to date as the global experiences of Coronavirus has added a new layer of prescience to a film that previously felt a wee bit undercooked. From reports that such a terrible thing is actually paying dividends on a grander scale (remember pollution going down?), to the paranoia caused by the rollout of the vaccine (the pod people spread the spores via a new treatment for flu), the movie has been given odd new injections of legitimacy due to the seismic events of the past few years as this rather muddled movie now seems way more uncomfortably familiar than it did back in 2007.
However, when you set aside the echoes of real life events, The Invasion still has some massive issues regarding its storytelling, or the way it approaches the material thanks to some streamlining of the original concept that, ironically, sacrifices a lot of the character the other versions had. For a start, the ditching of literal pod people who replace their victims after they crumble away entirely has been changed in favor of a brain invading spore which immediately adds something of a safety net that instantly diffuses tension. If the person is only being controlled and not a literal pile of dust, then there’s always the option of being saved and thus the stakes are inordinately lowered – also, the notion of a double emerging from from a chrysalis as you life ebbs from you is just such a fucking cool sci-fi concept and The Invasion’s attempts to distance itself from its pulp origins, again, tend to remove its individualism.
What the movie does do is try to engage in that weird habit of humanising its villainous epidemic by actually putting forward an argument that this could all be for the greater good as the planet seems to genuinely on the precipice of obtaining world peace as the alien spores nullify the need for wars and global unrest. This is something that’s always been present in Body Snatcher movies, of course, but usually, the case for submitting comes from the lips of a pod person trying to seduce our heroes, so it’s kind of weird to see it come from the movie itself. Maybe this would have be a chilling revelation if The Invasion wasn’t so messy or impersonal, but while Siegel’s version had the threat of communism/McCarthyism to it sink its teeth into and Kaufman and Ferrera chose to explore society’s growing self obsession and the military complex respectively, Hirschbiegel’s vision of it being a virus simply can’t measure up.
He certainly isn’t helped by the fact that his leads don’t actually seem to connect with the material at all with Kidman strangely being quite an uninvolving lead who seems to be wrapped in distracting amounts of plot armour at every turn. I realise this is a movie and all, but not only is she a psychiatrist whose ex-husband happens to not only be a director of the CDC, but her best friend is a doctor, his friend also a specialist in the field of viruses and her son has the incredible luck of being immune to the spore. On top of all that, she constantly finds cars with the keys still in the ignition, can out drive police and outrun mobs of infected in heels all the while staving off the infection by chugging Mountain Dew and spouting lines like “My god, you’re one of them, aren’t you?” – talk about main protagonist syndrome. While this shit might have been easier to swallow thirty years earlier, no actor – male or female – should have to shoulder the burden of this much bad writing. Elsewhere, it’s similarly tough to take Daniel Craig’s character seriously thanks to the truly abysmal wig they’ve stuck him in, but on the other hand, the movie is slick, it moves fairly fast, it has a cameo from Veronica Cartwright and does contain the occasional jarring moment (the infected have the unnerving habit of projectile vomiting at enemies and half-transformed people look like sweaty grey corpses), but no matter who directed what during this troubled production, it feels like no one really gets the original material enough to make it resonate the way it should.
A movie about Pod People where a lack of personality is the problem? Whatever next?
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