The Invasion

The Invasion (2007) Directed by Oliver Hershbeigel and James McTeigue

This remake of the 1956 classic Invasion of the Body Snatchers owes much to the subsequent remakes; the 1978 superlative remake, and the more forgettable 1993 remake, Body Snatchers. The original featured the now infamous Pod People, with large vegetative seed pods that produced the clones. In 78 the pods had shrunk to small parasitic flowers, and now the alien invaders are a virus.

The Plot
Dr. Carol Bennell (Nicole Kidman) is a psychologist. She notices several strange phenomena, changes in people's behavior; her son finds what appears to be a skin sample in his Halloween candy, and other oddities. She takes the skin to a medical friend, Ben Driscoll (Daniel Craig) and asks to have it analyzed.

Her life continues. She drops her son Oliver (Jackson Bond) off for a visit with his estranged father Tucker Kaufman (Jeremy Northam). She attends a posh dinner party at the embassy, chatting with the Russian ambassador, and his counterpart. But she notices more and more bizarre behavior. A homeless man, having a seizure, people acting strangely, either upset, or lacking emotions, gatherings of disparate people, very calm, very still. Her clients begin to act strangely. Some seem cured. One woman with a very volatile husband reports her husband isn't her husband; he doesn't fight with her anymore.

This progresses until she begins to see certain things like people in emotional distress being carried away. She sees a woman frantically trying to warn people that something is wrong, in traffic in a tunnel. She sees her hit by a car, and moves to help. A cop warns her away. She explains she is a doctor. He orders her away anyway. She asks where she should make her report. He informs her he took down her plate, and when they want her, they will summon her.

Someone tries to gain entrance to her home posing as a census taker. When she did not take the chain off the door, he tried to force his way in. When thwarted, he just calmly left.

She is now convinced something is wrong. Web searches of the phrase "My husband is not my husband" show huge numbers of hits (hundreds of thousands as opposed the 134 that are really on the web today) her medical friends confirm her fears; there is a virus. And it is spreading. It activates when you enter REM sleep, covering you in crusty exudates. If you are awakened prematurely, you go into cardiac arrest. Either way, who you once were, an individual, is dead.

Now she has to retrieve her son and try to reach a government lab to help with the cure. The only problem...who is infected, and who can you trust?

The Analysis

This movie has more potential than it realized. When the first draft was turned in, the producers were less than satisfied, and had some reshoots done; hence, McTeigue's involvement. I felt that there was more terror in the scenes of quite desperation trying to pass as infected than in the flat out run for your life scenes. Perhaps I would have liked it better if they had built the tension a bit longer.

There has been some unfair criticism that Kidman's performance was wooden; through much of the movie, she had to hide her emotions to fool the infected. As to the accusations the Craig's performance was wooden...so what is new or different with that?

A few things really stood out to me. One, there is no creepy phone call where the operator says "Remain near the phone, Dr. Bennell." We no longer find it odd that someone would know who we are without telling them. Gee, thanks, caller ID.

Another is the nature of the threat. In this day of AIDS, SARS, Lyme's, West Nile and Bird Flu, it is interesting that the invader is a virus. The invader spread by kiss, in fluids; i.e. infected tea, coffee, water, etc. and by projectile phlegm. That's right, invasion by loogie.

The last thing that interests me is the timing. In 1956 Invasion of the Body Snatchers was a metaphor for the cold war...a commie under every bed, a pod under every bed. In 1978 the movie succeeded because it played upon our fears of alienation and a society that was moving to an evermore impersonal norm. The 1993 version was said to be less successful partly because there was not a societal motivator dominant in the culture at the time. (I also blame suck production values and scripting.)

So what are the fears that exist today?

In 1978 when the aliens discovered you, they pointed, let out this gawdawful scream, and closed in on you. In 2007, you were arrested, asked to accompany security, or grabbed by medical or military personnel. Remember how I said there was no creepy phone call where the person on the other end of the line identified the speaker by name when they should have no way of knowing? Instead, they had the accident scene where the cop told her that he had taken her license number. She wanted to know why he had taken it. There was scene after scene of cops arresting people while other people looked on confused. The news was not informative, and the computer only helped by looking at how the data flowed. You got no answers from these sources; you just say patterns that suggest something.

I will tell you who the virus represents: If the pod people were communists, the virus stems from the Department of Home Land Security. I think that as we watch our freedoms being eroded in the name of the public good, it builds a deep sense of unease in us all, and that is what this movie tapped into. I think that if the movie had not been a chimera assembled by committee that it would have taken off like the 1978 version. As it stands, it is still pretty darn good.

I hope to be able to continue my reviewing from my new quarters in Guantanmo. Cheers!