The Invasion Movie Review
By Jason Revill
Let’s face it, schadenfreude is kind of my bread and butter. I love a good movie, but no one can revel in a terrible movie as much as I can. Whereas most people get mad when they pay money and it turns out what they went to see is terrible, I turn it around and just enjoy it. How else do you get through All the Kings Men? However, what I can’t stand is when a movie is so utterly pointless and half assed that it’s obvious the studio threw it out there in hopes of possibly recouping some of their loses based solely on the actors that are in the film. This is the case with The Invasion.
After the crash of a space shuttle, the people who were in immediate contact with it become infected with an alien virus that causes them to act unusually. Before you know it Washington, DC psychiatrist Carol Bennell (Nicole Kidman) is starting to notice the change not only within her patients, but her own family. Once her son gets infected it’s up to Carol and her friend Ben (Daniel Craig) to find the truth about this extraterrestrial infestation.
With both Daniel Craig and Jeffrey Wright there is complete waste of talent in this film. I get the impression that a good portion of Craig’s work got cut out and condensed, while Wright had scenes added so that he could over explain things that are going on. Meanwhile you have Kidman walking around trying to trick the pod people being stone faced, which is easy when your face is full of botox. Unfortunately it doesn’t help in most other circumstances.
The amount of clichés in this film is jut plain ridiculous. Of course things start on Halloween. Of course Kidman is a single mother. Of course she has an asshole ex-husband. Of course he’s the head pod person. Of course dogs freak out when the get near him. Of course she and her son have an obnoxiously cute little word game they play. Of course that’s how they can tell neither one of them is infected. Of course the kid’s immune to the disease. Of course he’s the answer to curing the world. It’s just one thing after another after another. For God’s sake there’s even a creepy Asian kid.
As if those weren’t bad enough, here are just a few other things that kind of drove me a little nuts. The whole time Kidman is running around alternately pretending to be infected or being chased by seemingly every pod person within miles, there are scenes on the television of how peaceful the world is becoming due to people losing their emotions. That wouldn’t be so bad except that it plays like a joke. Instead of being subtle and creepy we have these over the top scenes of the Janjuweed making peace in Darfur and George Bush shaking hands with Hugo Chavez. With every shot of an awkwardly digitized Bush it just got sillier and sillier.
How can the government be both the cause and solution to the infection? If the government has been overtaken by the pods and going around making friends with Osama Bin Laden and infecting the citizenry with vaccines, then how are they at the same times the ones who are working on the cure? On top of that, its own contradictions sort of take the knees out of any argument that this film tries to make.
My personal favorite moment in The Invasion is when, in a direct rip off of the 1978 version, one of Kidman’s patients comes in hysterical saying that her husband is not her husband. When asked what she means, the patient tells her that on the previous night when her husband came home the dog started barking at him. He calmly bent down snapped it’s neck and then threw it in the garbage. Kidman’s reaction is to tell the woman to double her medication and if he does anything else like that to leave him. Are you kidding me? He murdered his wife’s dog. What else is there for him to do, kill a hobo?
The worst thing about this film is its complete and utter lack of suspense. You know from the very beginning what happening. The people who get infected are so robotic in there actions and speech that there isn’t even a question about who’s a pod and who isn’t. Stephen Hawking has a more natural cadence to his speech. One of the great things about the 1978 version is that Donald Sutherland is in New York and all of a sudden in this sea of people that he’s never given any thought to he can’t tell who’s out to get him. That’s not the case here. In this film you know the whole time exactly who the bad guys are and that they are up to. When Nicole Kidman looks across the street at ten people all in black blatantly staring back it’s kind of silly. If I saw people doing that in real life I’d just assume they were pod people and get the hell out of there.
It would appear from Oliver Hirschbiegel’s previous film The Downfall that he is a pretty talented director and that whatever film he made here was completely lost after the studio test screened it and decided to reshoot it with the Wachowski brother’s protégé James McTeigue. What I don’t understand is why a studio would go get a talent foreign director and then when it didn’t screen well for a bunch of morons they hire someone else to add computer generated cutaways to cells in the body and some car crashes. I don’t get it. Especially when in doing so you get the feeling that as we cut back and forth to compress time we are missing the movie we were meant to see. What we end up with is a confused chase film that never fully realizes itself and telegraphs every plot point.
What’s the point of this whole mess? I would have liked for The Invasion to have made some sort of statement but by the end it’s just muddled and whatever it was trying convey gets lost. You can lay pretty much anything you want on top of the film. It makes me think that they put so little effort into an actual meaning hoping that our heightened political sensitivity would fill in the blanks for them. Seriously, is it about the media, truth in government or is it some left over Tom Cruise Scientology anti-pharmaceuticals rant? There really is no telling. By the time they hammer home on one final point at the end you just don’t care.
There have already been two great incarnations of the body snatchers movies and much like the 1993 version to even bother with this movie is just a waste of time and money. With the original 1956 version you have the whole threat of communism with not knowing if your friends and neighbors are really your friends and neighbors. While in the second Invasion of the Body Snatchers film you have the warning about conformity and modern isolationism. But in this one, you can tell they really want to make a point, but there’s not really one to be made. Whatever was there is lost in the process of reshooting. If you’re a fan of the originals or interested in seeing this one do yourself a favor and don’t You’ll be much better of just getting the first two and staying at home and having your own person pod people mini film festival.
The Grade
- Story: D
- Acting: C
- Visuals: C-
- Originality: D
- Enjoyability: C
- Overall: C-
|
