Warner Brothers hired David Kajganich to write they wanted to be a straight-forward remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, but Kajganich changed the script to reflect contemporary times. I believe that each generation gets the body snatchers that it deserves, from the Cold War McCarthy menace of the 1950s, the end of the world gloom of the 1970s Invasion of the Body Snatchers and the gory yet doomed 1990s Body Snatchers.
The explanation for the aliens in this version is very scientific. A space Shuttle crash lets loose a fungus that is scattered across the country. It infects people and when they go to sleep, it reprograms them. CDC director Tucker Kaufman (Jeremy Northam) is the first to be changed and his ex-wife Carol Bennell (Nicole Kidman) notices that he has become someone else. One of her patients, Wendy Lenk (Veronica Cartwright), says the very same thing.
This film is way ahead of the conspiracy theories of today, as Kaufman uses a flu vaccine to further spread the alien contagion throughout the world. I’m shocked more Twitter — sorry, X, I forgot — users haven’t been screaming about how this movie was the government telling us what they were going to do.
Carol and Dr. Ben Driscoll (Daniel Craig) attend a dinner party where they witness the transformation of a human into an alien. By now, they’ve been doing research with Dr. Stephen Galeano (Jeffrey Wright) that shows that anyone who has had acute disseminated encephalomyelitis (ADEM) is immune from the aliens. Thanks to movie logic, this includes Carol’s son Oliver (Jackson Bond).
Carol is eventually infected but this also brings in a bit of Elm Street as you must stay awake or you will be an alien. Luckily, she remains alert and her son is the key to fixing things, even if the society that the human race returns to is violent and emotional, unlike the perfectly ordered world that the aliens promise.
Originally directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel as a nearly effects free invasion movie, the studio was unhappy and asked for The Wachowskis to rewrite and reshoot some of the movie. After a year of the movie not progressing any further, James McTeigue was hired to shoot action scenes. During these, Kidman was injured and broke her ribs. That said, she made $17 million off this.
Remember when I said that each generation gets the bodysnatchers it deserves? This one is very 2007. I can’t remember much of that time and it seemed that everything was being remade as a faster and less soulless version of what came before. It’s a great looking film, it has pleasant leads and it tries to be about the forces that rule the world. Yet it comes after three versions of Jack Finney’s story The Body Snatchers that each had a point of view about the world and how it needed to change. This one ends with no horrifying conclusion, just the pod people waking up as if they were in a dream. Compare that to the horrific closes of the 1970s and 1990s takes.
The Arrow Video release of The Invasion has so many extras, including audio commentary by film critics Andrea Subisati and Alexandra West, co-hosts of The Faculty of Horror podcast; visual essays by film scholars Alexandra Heller Nicholas and Josh Nelson; archival features from the 2007 release; a trailer; an image gallery; an illustrated collector’s booklet featuring new writing by film critics William Bibbiani and Sally Christie; a reversible sleeve with original and newly commissioned artwork by Tommy Pocket and a double-sided fold out poster featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Tommy Pocket.
B&S About Movies 
You must be logged in to post a comment.