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Story snatchers

The Pod Squad returns in a ragtag remake
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By Steffen Silvis
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
November 7th, 2007 issue

COURTESY PHOTO
The others. Breathy but bold, Nicole Kidman does her best in Invasion.
Invasion

Directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel and James McTeigue
With Nicole Kidman, Daniel Craig, Jeremy Northam, Veronica Cartwright and Roger Rees

Invasion is advertised as the fourth screen adaptation of Jack Finney’s novel The Body Snatchers. It follows Don Siegel’s classic 1956 B picture, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Philip Kaufman’s brilliant 1978 remake, and Abel Ferrara’s less-heralded Body Snatchers from 1993. The truth, however, is that there may be a fifth version languishing in the vaults at Warner Brothers.
When filming of Invasion began, it was under the control of German director Oliver Hirschbiegel, who gained notice outside of Germany for his powerful film Downfall, dealing with the final days of Hitler. Intrigued, Hollywood came calling, and offered him a script by rookie screenwriter Dave Kajganich, whom various trade rags had earmarked as the hottest new talent.
However, after he delivered his final cut to the Brothers Warner, the studio, in classic fashion, was unhappy with the results, and handed the film to another group to re-edit, rewrite and reshoot.
This dreamier team was the Brothers Wachowski of Matrix fame (though, due to recent gender reassignment surgery, it’s probably best to advertise them as the Wachowski siblings) and their acolyte director James McTeigue, who made a thorough hash of V for Vendetta. The Wachowskis commandeered Kajganich’s script, while McTeigue helmed the cameras.
The result of this invasion is a confused, uneven film. In some years’ time we will no doubt be treated to Hirschbiegel’s director’s cut as a midnight screening or DVD bonus, which will then reveal whether it was the better film. But for now we are lumbered with this.
The first reels of Invasion are probably pure Hirschbiegel, and the director has done a good job of creating a menacing mood. In Kajganich’s story the invaders are viral rather than botanical, arriving on earth as a space shuttle explodes upon re-entering the atmosphere, which spreads the hearty organisms over a wide swath of America.
As in the prior films, it’s only gradually that people begin noticing changes in their friends and family, as individual personalities and crotchets are replaced with an unnerving placidity. This transformation appears to occur after sleep — though, unlike the separate pod person emerging from under a bed, the original body has become rewired through the ingested sleeper cells from Planet X.
Dr. Carol Bennell (Nicole Kidman) comes late to realizing what’s happening, even after one of her patients visits her alarmed by a strange change in her husband. Dr. Bennell immediately grabs her prescription pad to give the woman a ticket to Pharmacopia.
Yet soon the good doctor notices the altered states of people she knows, including her ex-husband Tucker Kaufman (Jeremy Northam, sporting a surname-as-nod to Body Snatcher director Philip), who suddenly comes back into the life of Bennell and their young son.
Junior will serve as that beloved cliché of the terror genre, the child in peril. Once the penny drops and Bennell understands what’s happening, primarily thanks to her best friend, Dr. Ben Driscoll (Daniel Craig), she’s in a race against time to save her son.
It’s at this point that the Wachowski show intrudes, complete with car chases and choreographed violence. The whole is finally wrapped up with a bit of theft from H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds and an appallingly trite ending (no howling Donald Sutherland or shouting Kevin McCarthy as Dr. Miles Bennell here).
If Siegel’s film expertly tapped into ’50s paranoia, while Kaufman’s expertly sent-up the ’70s’ “Me Decade,” it is impossible to know what Hirschbiegel and Kajganich were after in their update. Whatever it was, it’s been buried in Wachowski pyrotechnics, and we’re left with the rather dodgy comfort that, as long as there’s war and genocide, we’re assured of our innate humanity.
The would-be pod cast does all it can within the chaos, no doubt hoping a good film editor would salvage their work. There’s adequate work by Craig, Northam and Roger Rees, and though she’s again adopted the breathy, baby-doll delivery that she often employs when playing American, Kidman does some very nice work. She is especially good in those moments when her Bennell must convince the blank-faced freaks that she’s one of them.
The film is nicely stolen by Veronica Cartwright, one of the stars of Kaufman’s great version, who continues the tradition (except with Ferrara’s film) of connecting the cinematic history of the Body Snatchers (Siegel and McCarthy also appeared in Kaufman’s film).
Perhaps like art, every generation gets the Body Snatcher it deserves. This disordered, meaningless and butchered film is, perhaps, perfect only in that regard.

Steffen Silvis can be reached at ssilvis@praguepost.com


Other articles in Night & Day (7/11/2007):

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