The Invasion – DVD Review

Film, Reviews

Available at Amazon.com

Directed by
Oliver Hirschbiegel

Surreptitiously co-Directed by
James McTeigue

Cast
Nicole Kidman ………. Carol Bennell
Daniel Craig ………. Ben Driscoll
Jeremy Northam ………. Tucker Kaufman
Jackson Bond ………. Oliver
Jeffrey Wright ………. Dr. Stephen Galeano
Veronica Cartwright ………. Wendy Lenk
Josef Sommer ………. Dr. Henryk Belicec
Celia Weston ………. Ludmilla Belicec
Roger Rees ………. Yorish

Run Time: 99 minutes
Rated PG-13
DVD Release date: January 29, 2008

Jack Finney’s novel, The Body Snatchers, inspired three film versions prior to The Invasion. I wrote a column on them. They are all good. They are all good in different ways, but all good.

The Invasion is not good. It is anti-good. It destroys goodness.

I’d like to blame Nicole Kidman. She’s not a terrible actress, and she’s not hard to look at, but I cannot stand any of her movies save The Others. It’s not her fault though. She’s not very good here, and she does an unconvincing accent, but she is not to blame.

I wish I knew exactly who to blame, but I’m a little confused. Directing duties were originally assigned to Oliver Hirshbiegel, a German TV-movie specialist, best known for that movie about Hitler’s secretary. He finished the film in 2006. Then in 2007, the powers that be got James McTeigue, the latest director to wreck an Alan Moore comic, to direct some other parts. The resultant film is a jumbled mess of non-action, obnoxious mashed together flashbacks to previously seen moments in the film, with a stupid car chase taking up the bulk of the final reel.

Some guy named Dave Kajganic, known for. . . nothing, is credited with the script. But you know those “other parts” that McTeigue directed? Well, those came from the Wachowskis. Because nobody knows more about paranoia, identity, and psychological tension than the guys that wrote Assassins.

At any rate, the final script is terrible. TERRIBLE. The film inexplicably opens with the beginning of the third act, as if to serve as a promise of excitement to come. “All right audience, trust us, eventually you will get to see Nicole Kidman popping pills, looking haggard, and chugging Mountain Dew. “

Then we jump to a bunch of hokey NASA scientist-exposition jive that would be at home in any 1950s b-movie save, ironically, The Invasion of the Body Snatchers. “Scientists, doing science, ivestigating the deaths of our brave rocket men!”

We get multiple scenes of scientist exposition, but worse, we have a dinner party wherein the party guests explain the themes of the movie to the audience as though we were comprised of 4th graders riding the short bus with tasty windows. “The price of human individuality is conflict.” “Shut up you goddamn Russian!”

It is an awful script. For one thing, it takes the lazy shortcut of having the main character leave her son with her infected ex-husband. Easy way to get the drama going right? You should be able to get a sense of drama from that right? The mom feels guilty, and super maternal, and maybe a little depressed about losing the man she used to love to an alien virus? How do you fuck that up?

Well, this script manages too.

And just when you thought it couldn’t be more made of FAIL, it one-ups itself. You see, the kid is IMMUNE to the body snatchers.

IMMUNE!

What’s next? Are you going to have the scientists come up with a “cure” for the invasion?

THE SCIENTISTS COME UP WITH A CURE FOR THE BODY SNATCHERS!

But it is like a vaccination though, right? I mean being body-snatched is as irrevocable as it gets, right?

No?

The people can be changed back to real people? And you can use a crop duster to spread the cure? Jesus, how do you mess up source material that has THRICE proved itself unquestionably strong?

IMDB shows five people listed as “assistant editor” on this picture, but nobody as editor proper. Whoever is responsible for this duty needs to be slapped, firmly and often. There is no sense of pacing, no build-up, no tension, no drama, no climax.

In fact, anybody that was involved with the making of this film at all, even if you were the caterer, is invited to my house. I will slap the taste out of your mouth, and show you Philip Kaufman’s 1978 version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers so that you will feel the shame you deserve.

The DVD

The Extras
It’s got 18 minutes on the Invasion on Media History, and 3 other featurettes, each of which are about 3 minutes long.

The Inside Pulse
The Invasion is an abomination. What’s next? Are they going to make another remake of Night of the Living Dead, only this time, tack on an ending where all the zombies get turned back into regular people? Even the ones that were shot? And Ben and Barbara open bed and breakfast known as “B&B’s B&B” and have apple-cheeked interracial kids together?

The DVD Lounge’s Rating for The Invasion
CATEGORY
RATING
(OUT OF 10)
THE MOVIE

0
THE VIDEO

7
THE AUDIO

7
THE EXTRAS

3
REPLAY VALUE

0
OVERALL
0
(NOT AN AVERAGE)