Jack Finney’s sci-fi novel The Body Snatchers about the quiet zeal and the sinister shades of uniformity has proven popular among filmmakers willing to aim an allegory at the pertinent issue of the day. Don Siegel’s 1956 adaptation is considered a swipe at McCarthyism, in 1978 Phillip Kaufman’s effort tapped the anxiety of the day in the wake of Vietnam and Watergate, Abel Ferrara’s 1993 film might have been a metaphore about the spread of AIDS. The Invasion is the fourth movie based on the material and with current state of world affairs in mind one would think it should have enough issues to aim at. The movie does mention the war in Iraq so often it gets tiresome, but it fails to say anything meaningful about it or make an argument of any kind, apart from the accidental disturbing implication that war, violence and conflict in general is what makes us human.
A space shuttle crashes and sprays debris from Dallas to Washington, which contains spores of an alien virus. It spreads much like flu and makes the people infected duplicates of who they were before, only without the essence of what it is to be human. A psychiatrist named Carol (Nicole Kidman) has a patient who complains that “my husband just… isn’t my husband anymore”. Then her estranged husband suddenly wants to spend time with their son Oliver (Jackson Bond); the kid goes to spend a night with him and sends mum a message that dad is somewhat different, too. Soon enough there are reports of a strange new virus afflicting unsuspecting people en masse, with the only way of avoiding contamination is by staying awake.
It is surprising that the brittle beauty and considerable acting prowess of Kidman were deemed suitable for the largely physical and undemanding role of Carol, but the she is not the only high profile actor to be underused. Daniel Craig had probably been signed to the project before his James Bond fame, Jeffrey Wright elicits bewilderment as an implausibly insightful scientist who seems to know the virus inside and out after one brief glance through the microscope. The one actor who comes out with credit is Jeremy Northam who is appropriately subdued and sinister as Carol’s husband.
This state of affairs was probably not what director Oliver Hirschbiegel (Downfall) had in mind for his big-budget English-language debut, but what exactly he had in mind might never be known unless a director’s cut appears on DVD some time in future as a last-ditch attempt to bring the project in the black. The troublesome fate of the production is now well-documented with Warner Bros. having gone for a most eccentric salvage job after poor feedback to test screenings of Hirschbiegel’s original cut. The Wachowski brothers who have patented orchestrated mayhem in The Matrix of all people had been brought to revamp the commercial prospects of the movie with their director of choice James McTeigue (V for Vendetta) allegedly receiving licence to reshoot about a third of the material. The result is a Frankenstein monster of a movie patched together from low key horror, loud action, decapitated sci-fi allegory and a mother-and-son picture, with all of these cancelling each other out. The jazzy shifting of tone and focus is disorienting and ultimately disappointing, and with the allegorical ambition of the movie being robbed of a context the whole premise becomes inconsequential and preposterous.
