Jesus Christ this movie’s terrible.
Okay, wait. Let’s start over.
Ever since 1956’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers—a film
based on a novel by Jack Finney—the idea of body snatchin’ aliens
has been a sci-fi/horror staple. There’s the 1956 film, the 1978 update
with Donald Sutherland, the 1993 remake, and a slew of various
rip-offs. Point is, if you’re gonna do the whole body snatchers thing,
you’d better bring something new to the table. The Invasion doesn’t. (The plot, in case you missed it the first three times: Aliens
sneakily invade Earth, gradually replacing people with creepy, soulless
aliens who look human but aren’t.)
At their best, the body snatchers tales riff on
paranoia—something that’s almost always genuinely unsettling, and
something that isn’t ever going to go out of style. But the uninspired,
confused The Invasion (despite more than a few clunky references
to Hurricane Katrina, Iraq, AIDS, and, of course, 9/11) sucks all the
subversive joy out of its once-original premise.
The Invasion‘s troubled history doesn’t help: Originally, the
film was directed by German filmmaker Oliver Hirschbiegel, but Warner
Bros. hated his cut—so they hired The Matrix‘s Wachowski
Brothers for rewrites, and V for Vendetta‘s James McTeigue for
reshoots. The result is a clusterfuck of Hirschbiegel’s original
footage and McTeigue’s uncredited additions: While psychiatrist Carol
Bennell (a bored Nicole Kidman) frets about space invaders, she teams
up with two doctors, Ben Driscoll (Daniel Craig, also bored) and
Stephen Galeano (a wasted Jeffrey Wright), in an attempt to rescue her
precocious son. Along the way: Inept dialogue, craptacular CG, and
enough unintentional laughter to make The Invasion classifiable
as a comedy.
Oh, and—spoiler alert!—unlike prior versions of the
story, The Invasion boasts a fantastically unbelievable happy
ending. Yeah: The Invasion—a supposedly scary movie about
suspicion, conformity, and human frailty—ends with a glib,
chipper deus ex machina. I suspect this final insult is the
doing of a brainwashed, alien-controlled Warner Bros. exec. Either
that, or The Invasion is a genuinely painful example of just how
creatively bankrupt Hollywood can get. Whichever.
