Horror-101

‘The Invasion’ is as Bland as a Pod Person

The latest re-working of ‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers’ is a tasteless waste of a great cast

directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel
written by Dave Kajganich

The Body Snatchers, Jack Finney’s seminal novel about a quiet town that’s taken over by aliens who look like humans, has been remade, riffed upon, and plain ol’ stolen from more times in cinema than I care to mention. Filmmakers since have been continuously drawn to the one-two punch of the taut, suspenseful mood and the opportunity to wax metaphorical about a varying number of views.

The story itself, alleged by Finney to be nothing more than a simple science fiction tale, has acted as a cipher for the views and ideals of the filmmakers re-creating it. Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers, produced in 1956 (with a script allegedly doctored by Sam Peckinpah), seems a simple enough movie on first viewing, a rather romantic tale of two lovers on the run from the encroachment of an insidious alien takeover. At the time, however, the film was seen in some circles as a scathing indictment of Communism and McCarthyism, of the dangers of giving up individuality. The 1978 Philip Kaufman remake of the same name, which upped the gore and the suspense while keeping mostly to the heart of the original, worried more about the onset of groupthink than the danger of the Reds. And so on, with it’s influence felt from one movie to the next.

The Invasion, directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel (and Larry and Andy Wachowski and, um, James McTeigue) and written by Dave Kajganich, is another re-working, and it’s by far the least successful of the lot. It’s a mess, at times silly and inexplicable. Mostly, it’s just plain boring.

One of my biggest gripes with the remake and sequel mania we live in is that these movies, by their very nature, don’t surprise us. From frame 1 we know, more or less, exactly what we’re getting. The Invasion suffers greatly from this tendency. Every beat of the movie (yes, even the end) feels like it’s been telegraphed from a hundred miles further down the track. This is a recipe for a movie that doesn’t engage on even the most basic level. Car chases and gun fights seem as fun and exciting as a spelling test.

Another big problem for me is that, on paper, this is a hell of a cast. Daniel Craig, Jeffrey Wright, Veronica Cartwright? These are great actors who, in this movie, are bland and motionless. Nicole Kidman does her best to carry this movie, and she actually has some decent rapport with her son in the movie, but it doesn’t add up to anything. Her character of Carol Bennell is tremendously boring, doing everything you’d expect and nothing you don’t.

I usually hesitate to single out the writing of a particular film, for good or ill, because I think the process of making a movie often leaves exactly what constitutes ‘the writing’ up in the air, but in this case I can say without equivocation that The Invasion is one of the most poorly written movies in recent memory. It is just absolutely dead, not on the page, but on the screen, where it matters most. It’s not that there is anything that seems particularly clunky or juvenile, it’s that everything, from first to last, has no spark, no opportunity for the audience to thrill to the story unfolding before them.

Perhaps most frustrating with this movie is that some kind of attempt was made to re-work the theme of this movie into something that could have been quite interesting. Maybe not. But this is only hinted at, and on reflection it seems embarrassingly tacked on and disposable. The filmmakers could have just as easily replaced it with a fear of Canadians, and it wouldn’t have changed the story a bit.

Much has been written (read: speculated) about the circumstances involved with the making of this film and how it ties into the final product. As I have no first-hand information and no reliable accounts of what actually took place to precipitate the film’s original director being replaced by the Brothers Wachowski, I’ll stay mostly out of it. I will say two things, however: in the end, no matter what the circumstances, the movie is what it is, and what it is is the only thing I can have an opinion on. I’d love to hear from the different camps involved about why things shook out as they did, but as a fan and as a film-goer, all of that is beside the point.

The other point is one that should be obvious to anyone with an interest in the craft of filmmaking. When a director is replaced on a project, invariably it’s big news, and pundits all along the spectrum make their feelings known. While I agree, in principle, that removing a director in today’s Hollywood is a big deal and obviously a signal of conflict in the production, why is it perceived that re-writing the original script is not only acceptable but assumed? The two might seem unrelated if you, like most everyone else, believes that the screenwriter (and his or her tangible contribution to the film, the screenplay) is not equal to the director as a creative force in the production of a movie. I think otherwise, not out of some idealistic belief in the power of writing, but in what I think is the simple fact of the importance of the screenplay to the movie. When a director is replaced, it’s big news. When a writer is (essentially or literally) replaced, it’s business as usual. If replacing a director is tantamount to a troubled production, why isn’t replacing the writer assumed to be the same?

The Invasion is simply connecting the logical dots, moving from one obvious plot point to the next. There’s no room made for anything that isn’t obvious or for characters that surprise. I suppose an argument can be made that the whole point of this story is that the very nature of the alien takeover is quiet, calm, even seductive, and that its insidious nature is what makes it unique. In theory, that is possible, but filmmakers before this have found rich avenues for deep suspense using this story, so that’s no excuse.

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