The Invasion (2007)

The Invasion arrives as the fourth cinematic pass at Jack Finney's The Body Snatchers, a property that has now been strip-mined with diminishing returns for half a century. Oliver Hirschbiegel shot it, Warner Bros. disliked the result, and the Wachowskis were summoned to rewrite while James McTeigue quietly reshot seventeen days of action beats and a twist ending. The finished object bears the seams of that surgery. Nicole Kidman plays a Washington psychiatrist who notices her patients insisting their loved ones are not themselves, which is either a symptom of alien spores or a fair description of most marriages.

The film's social consciousness is modest and largely incidental. Kidman's Dr. Carol Bennell is the competent protagonist who drives the plot and ultimately rescues her son, though the screenplay never pauses to argue a thesis about gender. Jeffrey Wright appears as a capable scientist, and the film declines to comment on the fact, which is the correct instinct and also the extent of its cultural ambition. The infected periodically announce that they represent a better world, a scrap of anti-conformity inherited from the source novel, but no economic critique is attached and the sentiment evaporates the moment the shooting starts. The organism is a plague, not a parable about the climate.

What remains is craft and fatigue. Roger Ebert called it the least of the adaptations, and the box office agreed, returning forty million against a budget north of sixty-five. The immunity plot hinges on a childhood episode of ADEM, treated purely as a mechanism for the third act and never as anything resembling identity. Manohla Dargis found the politics abhorrent, which flatters the film considerably. In truth it has almost no politics at all, only the vague suspicion that feeling things is difficult and being a drone might be restful. On the ledger of contemporary cultural markers, this is a sparse entry. A star vehicle with a headache, and not much more.