The Invasion

The body snatchers are back for another earth invasion (if memory serves, they've already infiltrated our ranks successfully three times in films by Don Siegel in 1956, Philip Kaufman in 1978, and Abel Ferrara in 1993). This time they've hitched a ride on a NASA space shuttle. Safely landed, they spread as a germ during the exchange of fluids. That might not sound terribly efficient, but humanoid converts are ready to speed things along by vomiting into the soup and such, and soon infected government functionaries are bringing in a mass immunization programme supposedly against a new strain of flu. In fact the vaccine is a dose of alien DNA. When the recipients fall asleep the conversion is complete. All of which should give you pause before shelling out for a cola to go with the movie.

Standing between Them and Us is psychiatrist Dr Carole Bennell (Nicole Kidman), her boy Oliver (Jackson Bond), and friend - potential bf - Ben Driscoll (Daniel Craig). Unfortunately Oliver is staying with his deeply suspect dad (Jeremy Northam) and Ben's friends at the Russian embassy where he and Carole shelter may be susceptible to an internal coup. Given their dodgy accents (they're played by Brits and Yanks: Roger Rees, Josef Sommer, Celia Weston) it may already be too late.

As in the previous versions, the humanoids look like you and me, it's just that they're no longer emotional. "My husband is not my husband," complains one of Dr Carole's patients shortly after the space shuttle crashes. (She is played by Veronica Cartwright - a nice nod to the superior 1978 film of Jack Finney's novel.) It's possible to pass among them undetected by staring straight ahead blankly. In one of the movie's best passages, Kidman finds herself on an underground train of just such zombies, and wonders if her fellow passengers have been infected, if they're pretending to have been infected, or if they're always like this?

The excellent 1956 Invasion of the Bodysnatchers has often been interpreted as a Cold War allegory, although some critics saw the "pod people" as a metaphor for Communists, while others (correctly, I think) saw them as McCarthy-ites. This new version lards on the political zeitgeist with copious references to Iraq and other global hotspots (Darfur, Korea, Venezuela)… All of them handily solved within hours of alien take-over. There's also a neat suggestion that the Prozac Carole has been dispensing is not so different from the spiritual well-being the aliens are peddling.

Directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel, who made Downfall and Das Experiment, The Invasion snatches at its story in impatient fits and starts. This may not be his fault. It's an open secret that the Wachowki brothers were brought in after the producers were unhappy with the first cut (before Craig's Casino Royale duties) and their protégé James McTeigue directed substantial reshoots. It's impossible to say who is responsible for what, but it's easy to see the joins between the gripping psychological horror story and the action thriller heroics. For all their differences, most of the more effective sequences here derive from the 1978 film.

Jeffrey Wright gets the worst of the banal dialogue when he's forced to diagnose alien DNA under the microscope, but more problematic is the black hole where Kidman and Craig's chemistry should be. Her performance is markedly stronger in maternal scenes with Jackson Bond. Elsewhere this cold fish of a character seems half pod person already.

Despite its flaws, The Invasion is not quite the disaster some paint it to be. Jack Finney's idea that one day we might wake up alone in a world where other people's smiles mask sinister intent is a paranoiac's nightmare we can all relate to, maybe now more than ever.

Tom Charity

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