Don’t call it a comeback
The third time may be the charm, but the fourth time can be a real blow — which is the case for The Invasion
By Beth Capper
Published: August 22nd, 2007 | 12:44pm
Hollywood executives are apparently so bereft of ideas that they gave the green light to The Invasion, the third movie remake of the Invasion of the Body Snatchers franchise, and the fourth time Jack Finney's 1955 novel has been committed to celluloid.
Maybe it’s a rule that each time you repeat something, it loses a little of its original value, and the Invasion of the Body Snatchers movies, in all four forms, seems to prove this rule. Don Siegel's original Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) was a science-fiction classic, mirroring McCarthyist paranoia in Cold War–era America.
Phillip Kaufman's 1978 remake revamped the story with stunning performances from Donald Sutherland and Jeff Goldblum to express growing public distrust with the American government post-Watergate, and in 1993, horror film-maker Abel Ferrara (Driller Killer, King of New York) made Body Snatchers, shifting the previous films' from their city settings and replacing its lead male protagonist with a young girl on a U.S military base in rural Alabama.
The Invasion— the fourth and weakest of the lot — is the work of director Oliver Hirschbiegel, whose Hitler biopic, Downfall, achieved critical acclaim and multiple awards a few years back. This time Nicole Kidman is cast in the leading role as Dr. Carol Bennell — a female variation on Dr. Miles J. Bennell from the original and Matthew Bennell from the 1978 version. Bennell is a psychiatrist who spends so much time shoving pills down her patients’ throats that it’s little wonder she fails to notice everyone around her is turning into high-functioning sociopaths.
In the other films, people are snatched and replaced with pod people who are emotionless carbon copies of their former selves. In The Invasion— taking its lead from the zombies in 28 Days Later— the pod people disease is a latex-like organism that is transmitted when the infected people spurt projectile flem in the direction of others. The change occurs when the infected fall asleep.
The Invasion hints at a message many times but never quite delivers one. There are numerous references to the War in Iraq as well as a doctored news bulletin of George Bush shaking hands with Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez, but the significance of these isn't developed. At times, The Invasion seems to condemn the enforced conformity of the pod people, while at others, it suggests that our world might be a more peaceful place if we just give into this kind of large-scale conformity.
To be fair on Hirschbiegel, The Invasion's lack of clarity might have more to do with the Wachowski brothers, the Hollywood hack duo brought in by Warner Bros. at the last minute to do a number on the script. A similar thing happened to Siegal's original, which was initially released at the studio’s behest with a happy-go-lucky "you're government will save you" ending. The same happens in The Invasion when a scientist turns up at the end to save Bennell in a helicopter with a legion of U.S army soldiers. Someone should have told the studios that soldiers don't need a virus to become emotionless conformists.
What makes us human — according to a comically placed Russian diplomat who strikes up a debate with Dr. Bennell at a dinner party — is our propensity for violence, war, exploitation, and conflict. After all, we can't let our president go around hugging Hugo Chavez or bringing back our troops from Iraq. That would be barbarism indeed.
Issue #35
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