The Invasion (2007) We briefly touched on this one during last week's live streaming conversation about the 1978 "Invasion Of The Body Snatchers"......
(And by the way, many many thanks to BQ visitors who stopped into the event to join our chat.....you folks are the best and we can't wait zoom-ify with you again real soon!)
"The Invasion" arrived as the 4rth remake of Jack Finney's 1955 novel.....following director Don Siegel's 1956 original film version, Philip Kaufman's '78 remake, and Abel Ferrara's minor league but sometimes shockingly effective 1993 "Body Snatchers".
Planned as a big budget, big star action-horror opus, director Oliver Hirschbeigel's reinvention of the classic story sank in sea of notoriety....... with extensive rewrites and re-shoots orderrf by the deeply dissatisfied Warner Brothers top brass.
The result? As you can imagine.......a cobbled-together, wildly uneven mess.
But as we picked our way through the debris of what this star-crossedl movie became, we found admirable bits and pieces.......
First, let's at least credit the filmmakers here with a fair amount of prescience. In their altering of Jack Finney's basic mythology, they turned the seed pods into airborne alien microbes.......who travel from person to person via spitting, sneezing and puking..........
In other words.........they're a worldwide pandemic, spreading globally as they de-humanize their human hosts by coating them with a layer of goo while they sleep........(very much like Slimer's attack on Bill Murray in "Ghostbusters").
Once awake, the infected behave like the body snatchers we've all come to know and love........dead-eyed, emotionless automatons, whose only singular desire is to spray the uninfected with whichever of their bodily fluids are handy........
And not one person in this movie ever thinks of wearing a mask......ooops.
Since the movie maintains a breathless, hysterical pace for 99 minutes, it never slows down to answer all the questions it raises........(is it simply an alien virus, or is there a unified evil intelligence at work? We tend to believe the latter in order to swallow that all the infected instantly become organized co-conspirators in world domination.)
Early on, the film uses Finney's primary rules for body snatchers to make a fascinating, up-to-date observation.........since the infected no longer possess human emotions and instincts (love, ambition, empathy, etc...)they no longer show any interest in making war on one another.
Hence the snatchers' pandemic results in sudden peace in the Middle East.
A fine ironic point.......but in the movie's chaotic chain of events (Nicole Kidman and her young son fending off the snatchers as they're chased all over the place). nothing much is made of it.
Of maybe it got lost in the buzzsaw editing.......only to return in the film's final minutes, when a cranky Daniel Craig notices that the defeat of the Snatchers (through a vaccine!) has plunged the world right back into stupid wars and pointless carnage.
Hey, but that's what we call.......humanity.
The film does manage to work up a few tense, unnerving sequences in its first half......but utterly collapses into a standard collection of shootouts and car crashes........no different than the last 87 mindless summertime popcorn movies.....(if anyone still remembers how lousy some of those were....)
Since we're always partial to any version of Jack Finney's book, and for the charismatic star power of Kidman and Craig, plus the the one or two provocative ideas floating around in it,, we'll leniently snatch 2 & 1/2 stars for "The Invasion".
For whoever's tasked with creating the next inevitable remake........we strongly suggest going back to seed pods. They're way more photogenic and sexy than microbes......
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