The Invasion (2008, DVD)

The 2007 remake of The Invasion of the Body Snatchers unfortunately is a dud. The problem lies in its paltry attempts to update the storyline for modern audiences. Screenwriter Dave Kajganich decides for some weird reason that The Invasion should be like The Discovery Channel and wastes precious screen time wallowing in the science-fiction reality by showing us in vivid 3d cells being consumed by a foreign parasite of some sort and literally rewriting the DNA. As a biologist, it s nice they tried to put effort into creating a plausible explanation for alien life and blah blah, but really now, the lengthy time commitment to giving body snatchers scientific realism could have been spent on greater things, like giving Nicole Kidman more personality than the phone book, or having Daniel Craig do something more than look moon-eyed at his audience.

Dr. Carol Bennell (Nicole Kidman) is a psychiatrist who finds her daily routine a bit shaken up as she finds that people in her daily life are acting a bit weird. After finding an alien looking tissue sample, which she delivers to her best friend/ I m hopelessly in love with you interest Dr. Ben Driscoll (Daniel Craig), the two begin to realize that there might be some sort of parasite going around that turns people into an emotionless hive entity bent on enslaving mankind into their collective.

The sci-fi premise is awesome, but given that screenwriter Kajganich wasted plenty of time explaining the bloody parasitic disease and why you should not sleep, he sure doesn t explain why all the doctors in the movie act hopelessly stupid. The Invasion never really joins together all the loose plot pieces and leaves them in their TV narrative- i.e. oh the news said something about a shuttle crash and how it s maybe intentional- but there s no eureka moment from our main characters that actually ties the bloody crash to the aliens and their situation. The stupidity is agonizing enough to sit through.

Then there s also the casting of Nicole Kidman, who is so great at imitating a Body Snatcher, I ended up lumping her in the same category as alien. The problem is she never grabs the audience s sympathy. She starts off cold and unemotional and strangely spends the remaining 80% of the movie acting cold and unemotional to trick the aliens (ooohhh, clever). The one moment in the film where she truly has a chance to express herself is when she leaves her kid Oliver (Jackson Bond) in care of her former husband, Tucker Kaufman (Jeremy Northam) to attend a high-society party with Dr. Driscoll, and gets asked thrown into some pseudo-intellectual dinner party ha ha old chum talk, she finally blurts out some nonsense about post-modernist feminism being a sign of human evolution and that s basically when you ve realized that director Hirshbiefel has casted a robot to be the star of his alien-film.

Now even with crummy characters, The Invasion could have redeemed itself with breakneck pacing and some cool human-hive scenes. But it does not. Director Hirshbiefel paints the whole movie in drab rainy day contrast and it looks pretty depressing from the onset. Since we know what s going to happen, it is all about execution- her regular life should seem regular until the little cracks start showing up. The problem is that The Invasion s cracks are so obvious that you wonder how on Earth the main characters don t notice anything until the whole planet is practically crawling with the aliens. Then there s the horrible magic bullet answer to all woes- of course Oliver s magically immune to the disease and of course you have the world s smartest scientists working on the solution. It s become hackneyed to go the evolution route as a explanation as to why one little boy doesn t get a disease when the rest of the world does.

With the 1990s and 2000s saturated with zombie flicks and a vastly superior I Am Legend remake, the problem with The Invasion is that the sci-fi realism doesn t really work. The pacing is all wrong, the whole attention to the Don t Sleep mantra doesn t quite nearly have its due suspense, and the mysterious good guys working on the cure never really get an explanation. If The Invasion had included a plot, well it might have fared a bit better, but basing a movie entirely on a premise isn t a very good idea. Skip this one.