Humanity missing in soulless 'Invasion'

By Michael Sragow | Sun movie critic

August 17, 2007

(C-) Apparently cooked up by a squad of Oxford-educated chimps and edited by a team of Iron Chefs soused on sake, the fourth version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers has nothing going for it except the smashing good looks of Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig. Set mostly in present-day Washington, with a long stop in Baltimore, The Invasion is even worse than the forgotten 1993 version, Body Snatchers, and that was set on a boring military base.

Even if you sense the movie dead-ending at the close of every sequence, the pull of the central idea may keep you hooked for a while. You'll end up wondering how a film can miss so badly when it features outer-space organisms hitchhiking to Earth and taking over our bodies and brains while destroying our emotional identities.

Both Don Siegel in 1956 and Philip Kaufman in 1978 didn't merely take the premise as a suspense hook: They exploited every inch of it for humor and drama. For example, they squeezed exquisite sardonic fun from most people's inability to tell humanoids from humans. And these directors knew that for the body-snatching concept to get an imaginative grip on an audience, their films had to generate characters who had real personalities, and place them in atmospheres that arose from the daily comings and goings of 20th-century life.

This movie is too impatient and out of it to express either what makes humans individual or what makes them part of a community in the new millennium. When the pseudo-humans tell their lovers and spouses and mothers and friends that they're a new, improved version of mankind, free of turmoil and completely interconnected, you may feel like cheering them on, even when they become as exaggerated as the flesh-eating freaks in Dawn of the Dead.

History lessons

The classic first and second movie versions of this story (all derive from Jack Finney's 1954 Collier's magazine serial) responded organically to the life and times of the filmmakers. Siegel's hard-hitting B-movie was partly a satiric outcry against Eisenhower-era conformity; it could also be read as a parody of Communist infiltration and anti-Red paranoia. Kaufman's superb, comic-romantic thriller was a lament for the end of the counterculture. As he told me then, "We still dress like the '60s, we still feel we have the individualism and concerns of that time, but meanwhile we're more into our careers, and colleges are turning out social units instead of scholars."

The Invasion pays homage to those versions - it even contains a small role for Veronica Cartwright, who was Kaufman's second female lead. But compared with those killer movies, The Invasion proves to be fundamentally hollow. It substitutes some clever jokes about anxieties over global conflicts for genuine observations about the way we live now. Maybe the credited director, Oliver Hirschbiegel, and screenwriter, Dave Kajganich, thought they were bringing the fable up-to-date by making their heroine a psychiatrist who's also a single mother. But that just seems so '80s, so Murphy Brown. It's fun to think that Kidman chose the role of a woman whose ex-husband is part of an insidious and dangerous alien invasion as a slap at Tom Cruise and Scientology, but it gives her nothing to act except frenzy and mother-tiger fury.

Craig is well-cast as her best pal, a doctor (and a scientist or clinician of some sort); Kidman, with her curious, sexy-good-girl aura, and Craig, with his earthiness and appetite, could have sparked volatile chemistry. But Kidman cuts short her one make-out session with Craig by saying she wants to preserve their friendship.

The gifted but misused Jeremy Northam gets too much screen time as Kidman's ex-husband, a U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director who's also the main bad guy. Infected by the space spores when he touches wreckage from a crashed NASA shuttle (named The Patriot), he quickly uses his office at the CDC to spread word of a flu pandemic that can be cured with a vaccine. He and the rest of the spore-people have an easier method of infecting humans: They can simply hurl on them. There hasn't been so much pea soup spit onscreen since The Exorcist.

As Kidman, Craig and his colleague, Jeffrey Wright, figure out how the spore organism works to take over people while they sleep, the movie becomes one piece of trumped-up suspense after another, without any creativity or emotional luster. The aliens' plot emerges mostly from Northam's point of view and develops so quickly that you wonder why the blogosphere isn't erupting with conspiracy theories - after all, some bloggers never sleep anyway.

Pods left behind

In previous versions the new humans grew out of pods; here they simply burrow out from within. There's no build-up to dark secrets. It would have been a coup for these filmmakers to figure out how to make the growth of ersatz humans haunting without pods. Instead, alas, the good guys simply discover one of their acquaintances turning all gooey and webby as they catch him mid-transformation on a bed.

Before long, everything gives way to routine chases and woman-in-jeopardy ploys. The action doesn't stop long enough for us to savor Kidman's discovery of a nascent rebel group who know they shouldn't show emotion: in seconds, one of them cracks, and Kidman's alone again. There are probably more action tropes per minute dumped into this movie than there were in Casino Royale, which of course starred Craig as James Bond and Wright as Felix Leiter. But even the splashiest scenes feel slapped together; in one montage the editors flash back to a scene that's been cut out of the movie, and a pivotal break-out takes place in an incomprehensible flash-forward.

It's unclear how much we should blame screenwriter Kajganich and director Hirschbiegel, who won international acclaim for his overrated but accomplished final-days-of-Hitler movie, Downfall. It's been widely reported that this movie was extensively rewritten by the Wachowski brothers and reshot by James McTeigue. Maybe when Hirschbiegel sees this movie, he'll react the way Siegel did when his studio ordered a new, upbeat prologue and epilogue. "I felt," Siegel said, "as if I were working for the pods."

>>>The Invasion (Warner Bros.) Starring Nicole Kidman, Daniel Craig, Jeremy Northam. Directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel. Rated R. Time 90 minutes.

michael.sragow@baltsun.com