The Invasion

First of all: No pods.

Without the pods, it's really not an invasion of the body snatchers, is it? — but when the movie ends up, you'll understand the podlessness. (It's dumb.)

But I digress.

The story of alien invasion and body-burglary is based upon the well-regarded novel by Jack Finney (which became a landmark of the sci-fi film genre in director Don Siegal's 1956 original, starring an agitated Kevin McCarthy in a career-defining role), and follows a Washington D.C. psychiatrist called Carol (Nicole Kidman), who unearths the origin of an epidemic from the outer limits after a space shuttle crashes and her ex-husband (played with perfect chilliness by Jeremy Northam) is subsequently infected. Turns out blood is thicker than goo when Carol's young son, Oliver (Jackson Bond), has the key to kill the evil invaders running through his veins.

But before that can happen, Carol has to slowly figure out what's going on. Emphasis on slowly. The beginning of the film — especially the scenes involving one of Carol's patients (played by Veronica Cartwright, who's still so memorable from her role in the creepy 1978 version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers) — has reasonably weighty resonance.

Unfortunately the lead-in is not enough to sustain one through the bad times of bland Bond (aka, Daniel Craig, playing a cardboard cutout here as Carol's would-be bf. This was prior to his being cast as 007 — yep, The Invasion has been stagnating a while, and underwent some reshoots by James McTeigue and the Wachowski Brothers under the supervision of uber-producer Joel Silver). Nor will the tense set-up get you through the pointless, meandering dialogue-heavy scenes which are punctuated by shoe-horned vehicular action sequences and projectile-vomiting alien beings who infect our food supply (I hope you like your coffee extra-chunky).

At least Kidman and Craig are slickly gorgeous, and while her accent morphs more often than the human-to-ET bodies here, they can act. Kidman's got the gravitas (and gravity-defying bod) to keep you looking, and Craig, given a truly thankless role, does his level best to shake (and stir) things up. The child actor (er, Bond… I'm getting confused) is fantastic and shows admirable range.

Credited director Oliver Hirschbiegel may have set out to make a sociopolitical thriller — there are some talky glimmers of perhaps such an agenda here and there — but the message is crushed by squealing brakes, gunfire, explosions, and quick-cuts.

While the 90s adaptation of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (directed by Abel Ferrara) was more in the pure horror vein, the '56 version had Communists reflected in its monster-mirror, and the one released in '78 artfully vilified Watergate while celebrating the Me Gen. Now would have been a good time to explore our recent rash on pandemics and war wrapped in an intense thriller, but alas, we are slammed with Silver's car chases instead.

The fact that the pod-concept was excised is what really ruined The Invasion for me — while I did not think the movie was all bad (for the few reasons outlined above, and some nice cinematography and good score) — the vicariously experienced terror of the characters seeing their replacement bodies taking shape is what really nails the horror aspects of the story, and without that this tedious tale is really just an empty husk.

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Reviewed by Staci Layne Wilson