Every generation gets the body snatchers it deserves. Don Siegel’s 1956 Invasion of the Body Snatchers preyed upon a fear of encroaching Communism; Philip Kaufman’s superior 1978 version suggested the death of the free-love era; and Abel Ferrara’s underrated 1993 Body Snatchers took place in an already soulless, military-obsessed country. Hirschbiegel’s newest adaptation of Jack Finney’s novel is mainly about Hollywood’s fear of originality, its fear of losing an audience. So it drains all the genuine terror from the story, hauls the unspoken, unwritten subtext to the film’s periphery and explains everything. Essentially, The Invasion has already joined the pod-people collective.
Kidman stars as Carol Bennell, a Washington, D.C., psychiatrist with an ex-husband (Northam) who works in government, a charming son, Oliver (Bond), and a doctor boyfriend (Craig). Everything’s fine until her ex, acting a bit peculiar, suddenly turns up and wishes to take Oliver for the weekend. Meanwhile, one of Carol’s patients (Veronica Cartwright, who was also in Kaufman’s version) reports that her husband has been acting strangely as well. Before long, it’s a full-blown epidemic. Television reports that the United States government is ignoring it, calling it a flu, while other countries are apparently preparing for a full-scale emergency (shades of Sicko).
Later, when more and more people succumb to the alien pods, the news begins to report peace treaties all over the world.
Hirschbiegel, who received an Oscar nomination for his foreign-language film Downfall, makes the alien takeover sound almost enticing, but that’s because the movie has no idea how to portray the individuality that humans would lose in the deal. Kidman spends many long sequences pretending to be a pod person, her face blank, walking through crowds of people with equally blank faces. In the process, she loses the story’s tension. The Invasion misses every chance to seek any new avenues—several references to drugs go unexplored—or even reinvent the old ones. It even does away with the famous pods and alien shrieks. Now pod people simply vomit on their victims, the victims go to sleep, and that’s it. Likewise, this movie will probably induce snoozing, hopefully without the vomit.
The Invasion
* 1/2
Nicole Kidman, Daniel Craig, Jeremy Northam, Jackson Bond
Directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel
Rated PG-13
Opens Friday