Reviewed by Craig McPherson
Stars Nicole Kidman, Daniel Craig, Jeremy Northam, Jackson Bond,
Veronica Cartwright, Jeffrey Wright, Josef Sommer, Celia Weston
Produced by Joel Silver
Written by Dave Cajganich, based on the novel by Jack FInney
Certification UK 15 | US R | Australia MA
Runtime 110 minutes
Directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel & James McTeigue
When William Shakespeare wrote the immortal line “that which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet” in Romeo and Juliet, odds are he might have been tempted to reword that line had he borne witness to The Invasion.
Billed as a loose re-telling of The Invasion of the Body Snatchers, this Nicole Kidman vehicle plays out more like a patchwork quilt of sci-fi horror, as if writer Dave Kajganich took a blender and tossed in the original Jack Finney novel, added elements of Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later, and a little of Wolfgang Petersen’s Outbreak to round out the flavour. The end result is a movie that might have appealed to a critic’s sense of charity had it been a low budget independent film with no-name actors vying for a break. However considering that this had the backing of a major studio, features two prominent stars (Kidman and Craig), and actually used The Invasion of the Body Snatchers as its working title during production, and you have a movie that almost screams out for a savaging.
For reasons best known only to Kajganich and director Hirschbiegel, the premise of plant-like alien pods as the catalyst for cloning the human populace is jettisoned in favour of a space-born virus that arrives on Earth via the fuselage of a crashed space shuttle — presumably chosen either to make the story seem more real and plausible or because it offered a way to quickly, easily and cheaply cobble together an ending hinging on a lab-developed vaccine (notice the absence of the word “exciting” there).
The rest of the story is pretty much paint-by-numbers as Kidman plays Carol Bennell, one of only a few folks who clue in fairly early that the people around them are being taken over by an alien force which kicks into morphing high gear during REM sleep — pretty much the only visible plot device retained from the original Body Snatchers premise. From there we are treated to Bennell trying to track down her kid who is staying with his now alien daddy, Bennell fleeing from zombie-like mobs, and Bennell trying to stay awake. Along the way, little is done to capitalize on the feeling of paranoia that fueled the original. Instead the audience is presented with some cheap gun play and a car chase, almost as if to deliberately try and hit a few of those precious formulaic “action beats” that so many popcorn movie scripts call for.
So who is to blame for this poor pastiche of film making? Certainly not Kidman and Craig, who did their best with what they were given to work with. Was it Kajganich’s pedestrian script, Hirschbiegel interpretation, or the result of meddling studio execs who called in director James McTeigue (V for Vendetta) to re-shoot entire scenes they weren’t happy with? Or maybe all of the above? With all due apologies to the Bard, compost by any other name would still stink, and insofar as compost goes, The Invasion is a heap.
• Who is renting these straight to DVD turkeys? Craig McPherson blogs for The Guardian
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SECOND OPINION | Stuart O'Connor Unfortunately, I am not able to give a second opinion on this film. For some bizarre reason, there were no preview screenings for film critics here in the UK. Which is quite illogical, really, because although it means UK-based newspapers, magazines and websites won't have reviews of The Invasion — apart from the ones that have US correspondents, of course, which is, ooh, most of them — it won't stop the British movie-going public searching the internet for reviews of said film.
Reviews such as the one by Dennis Harvey of Variety, who calls it "a slick but forgettable, characterless thriller". Or Manohla Dargis at the New York Times, who says: "The latest and lamest version of Don Siegel’s 1956 pulp classic Invasion of the Body Snatchers might have been an accidental camp classic if its politics weren’t so abhorrent and the movie didn’t try to hide its ineptitude behind a veil of pomposity." Ouch. And William Arnold of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer doesn't pull his punches either: "This is the first alien invasion I can remember in which I actually found myself rooting for the aliens." Zing. Can you blame Warner Brothers for not wanting to let the much cattier UK critics get their claws into it?
But the biggest problem with The Invasion, of course, is its star. When's the last time Nicole Kidman had a hit? Bewitched? The Stepford Wives? BMX Bandits? Exactly, you see my point. Anyway, if Warner Brothers production president Jeff Robinov is to be believed, we won't be seeing any more films with women in the lead roles. Yep, the enlightened one apparently spoke out after The Invasion — as well as The Brave One (Jodie Foster) and The Reaping (Hilary Swank) — all tanked at the box office. Of course, Warner Bros has denied he ever said such a thing. And there's no truth whatsoever to the rumour that Rosie O'Donnell sat on Robinov until he took it back.