Wel­come to The Pod Peo­ple Film Fes­ti­val, The Dork Report’s third mini movie ret­ro­spec­tive. After catch­ing up with Rid­ley Scott and George A. Romero, we now take a look at four adap­ta­tions of Jack Finney’s novel The Body Snatch­ers, plus one unof­fi­cial homage / satire.

1. Inva­sion of the Body Snatch­ers (1956)
2. Inva­sion of the Body Snatch­ers (1978)
3. Body Snatch­ers (1993)
4. The Fac­ulty (1998)
5. The Inva­sion (2007)

Nicole Kid­man must be one of the unluck­i­est stars in Hol­ly­wood, hav­ing recently starred in at least two big-budget cat­a­stro­phes. Frank Oz’ The Step­ford Wives (2004) was sab­o­taged by cast mem­bers drop­ping out, exten­sive reshoots, and com­pet­ing script revi­sions that left sig­nif­i­cant log­i­cal plot holes in the fin­ished film. Sim­i­larly, Inva­sion is best described as quite sim­ply a bro­ken movie. One full year after the com­ple­tion of prin­ci­pal pho­tog­ra­phy under direc­tor Oliver Hirsch­biegel (Down­fall), pro­ducer Joel Sil­ver con­tracted Andy and Larry Wachowski (The Matrix, Speed Racer — read The Dork Report review) to write new scenes to be directed by their pro­tégé James McTeigue (V for Vendetta — read The Dork Report review). Warner Bros. expended $10 mil­lion on 17 extra days of shoot­ing in an attempt to reshape what was report­edly a more inter­nal, psy­cho­log­i­cal sus­pense piece into more com­mer­cial thriller.

Do you ever get the feel­ing that you’re in a ter­ri­ble movie…?

After a brief, promis­ing open­ing scene (a flash-forward, we later learn, to a world almost fallen to an alien attack), Inva­sion quickly descends into full-on sci-fi action cliché. A space shut­tle dis­in­te­grates on re-entry, car­ry­ing a pay­load of vir­u­lent spores bent on world dom­i­na­tion. After the real-life loss of the crews of the shut­tles Chal­lenger (1986) and Colum­bia (2003), this spec­tac­u­lar spe­cial effects sequence is about as taste­ful as watch­ing CGI sky­scrap­ers crumble.

One of the Wachowski’s late addi­tions was a ridicu­lously long car chase through the streets of Wash­ing­ton DC (filmed in Bal­ti­more), with psy­chi­a­trist Carol (Kid­man) behind the wheel of a lit­er­ally burn­ing Mus­tang. It’s beyond implau­si­ble that a shrink would have the dri­ving skills of a modern-day Bul­let (Steve McQueen) or Pop­eye O’Doyle (Gene Hack­man in The French Con­nec­tion). In fact, Kid­man dam­aged more than her career: she broke sev­eral ribs dur­ing an acci­dent incurred while shoot­ing the sequence.

The biggest prob­lem is not the clum­sily grafted-on action spec­ta­cle but the choppy screen­play. It’s painfully obvi­ous to spot the seams between Dave Kajganich’s orig­i­nal script, which one can infer would have made for a more sub­tle hor­ror story about an alien inva­sion accom­plished with­out bul­lets or the explod­ing of infra­struc­ture, and The Wachowski Broth­ers’ reduc­tion to the low­est com­mon denom­i­na­tor. The movie is at its best when Carol senses the sub­tle changes of her city’s daily rou­tine as the inva­sion spreads. It’s also inter­est­ing as she encoun­ters other unin­fected sur­vivors that have learned to hide in plain sight. Veron­ica Cartwright, who appeared in Philip Kaufman’s 1978 ver­sion, appears as one of Carol’s patients who is appar­ently nat­u­rally immune. She coun­sels her to pre­tend to be a Step­ford Wife in order to avoid detec­tion by the dis­pas­sion­ate alien intel­li­gences that have taken over most of the pop­u­la­tion. But these moody sequences are all too brief in-between the car chases and explosions.

“Our world is a bet­ter world”

A huge chunk feels miss­ing from the mid­dle; the sec­ond act should be a slow dis­cov­ery of the details of the inva­sion and a grad­ual esca­la­tion of the con­flict. But Carol and her doc­tor para­mour Ben (Daniel Craig) leap to the accu­rate con­clu­sion of an alien inva­sion based on only a few observed cases of mild weird­ness around them, clear­ing the rest of the movie’s run­ning time for a series of chase sequences. Worst of all is yet another crim­i­nal mis­use of poor Jef­frey Wright (reunited with 007 co-star Daniel Craig), a bril­liant actor sad­dled with most of the script’s laugh­able tech­nob­a­b­ble that leaves no room to the imag­i­na­tion (the orig­i­nal 1956 Inva­sion of the Body Snatch­ers was arguably not spe­cific enough, but the 1978 ver­sion found just the right level of gory detail with­out get­ting bogged down in tedious pseudoscience).

Jack Finney’s clas­sic sci-fi novel The Body Snatch­ers has been adapted over and over into movies that illu­mi­nate the con­cerns of the times. Don Siegel’s 1956 orig­i­nal was a thinly-veiled cri­tique of McCarthy­ism. Philip Kaufman’s 1978 remake also made sense in a post-Vietnam and Water­gate era. Abel Fer­rara applied the metaphor to blind obe­di­ence and con­for­mity in the mil­i­tary in his 1993 Body Snatch­ers. Robert Rodríguez found the most per­fect set­ting yet, as he sat­i­rized teen peer pres­sure in high school in The Fac­ulty (1998). What does the oft-told Body Snatch­ers tale mean today? Inva­sion is the fourth ver­sion of novel, and the sec­ond to ditch the notion of replace­ment bod­ies. As in The Fac­ulty: the aliens are puppetmaster-like par­a­sites that take over human bod­ies with­out per­ma­nently harm­ing them. Inva­sion makes a fleet­ing ref­er­ence to other nations pub­licly com­bat­ing the alien insur­gents. The US is the only one to hide behind a cover story that has the oppo­site intended effect, only fur­ther enabling the inva­sion to suc­ceed. Inva­sion might have been a bet­ter film if it had focused more on this glim­mer of polit­i­cal satire than on Shut­tle dis­as­ters and burn­ing Mustangs.

Offi­cial movie site: http://theinvasionmovie.warnerbros.com/

Buy the DVD from Ama­zon and kick back a few pen­nies to The Dork Report.