THE INVASION – oliver hirschbiegel – 1.0 / 10

Easily the worst of the four films based on the 1956 science fiction novel The Body Snatchers, The Invasion gets absolutely nothing right. Unbelievably stupid to the point of having the main character’s child’s Superman costume have a mask, Hirschbiegel’s film has no insight to offer and nothing to recommend it except for maybe a nifty car chase at the end of the film that was probably directed by the Wachowskis anyway (in a much publicized reshoot) in which, for some reason, one of the pod people hurls a Molotov cocktail at the heroes' fleeing car.

But I guess the actual on screen action was never the interesting part about these films. No, the interesting part was seeing how what makes a “pod person” changes from one film to the next, to see what each new generation views as the height of conformity. And on that level, The Invasion has a couple of interesting, though not exactly earth shattering, things to say, namely that without humanity, the planet would be free of war and strife of all kinds. A couple of scenes in which Nicole Kidman’s Dr. Carol Bennell walks down the now quiet and orderly streets of Washington, D.C. have the right mix of spookiness and awe that the picture strives for and fails to achieve during the rest of its running time.

The biggest difference between this version and the last two, and the one that says the most about the times in which we live has nothing to do with the nature of the pod people. It has to do with the way in which humans become pod people. In each of the last three versions, the humans are replaced with pod versions of themselves. In this version, the humans are merely infected with the pod spores and turned into new versions of themselves. This may have been done to ping off our collective fear of a pandemic in our now globalized world but what it really does is open the door to the creation of a cure that would allow this film, unlike the prior three, to have a completely unearned happy ending. Indeed, this new version of The Body Snatchers takes the easy way out and has everything end perfectly happily.

That fact says more about the times we live in that anything about the pod people or the differences between their society and ours. We need to have a happy ending now. Not because a modern audience can’t take an unhappy ending (especially an earned one, see The Departed for proof of that) but because a modern studio won’t finance a movie like this unless it ends happily. Those responsible for our entertainment have become so spineless that that they can’t even remake a film faithfully if it involves an unhappy ending. It’s an incredibly sad state of affairs and if the film had attempted to focus on this element of pod people behavior, it could really have been something. Oh well, I guess we’ll have another one in a couple decades.