THE INVASION (2007)

It’s sometimes said that the best horror succeeds by injecting disquiet into the everyday; by turning the things we thought were safe and reliable, homes or people or places or objects, into sources of threat. In this light, the various screen incarnations of Jack Finney’s novel The Body Snatchers—from 1956, 1978, 1993, and 2007—tap into the most fundamental horror imaginable, the fear of losing control of our bodies, of our minds no longer being “us”.

This is, of course, very similar to the fear that zombie stories build on, and that has also been exploited creatively in countless other films from Robert Hamer’s “Haunted Mirror” story in Dead of Night (1947) to Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017). But it also resembles certain fears of disease. Cancer is, at least in part, dreaded because the body seems to be turning upon the self. Conditions like rabies or, more mundanely, dementia scare us because they strike at the mind and thus at identity. A severe cut could be just as life-threatening as any of these, but the idea doesn’t inspire the same kind of fearfulness in most people.

Perceptions of disease are central to Oliver Hirschbiegel’s version of the Finney novel, The Invasion, because more than any of the others it draws parallels between “body snatching”—the process by which an alien life form takes over humanity—and illness. In the novel and the three preceding films, the alien invaders operate by growing facsimiles of human beings in pods, then killing the human originals and replacing them with the soulless, conformist “pod people”. But in The Invasion the extraterrestrial spores enter people’s bodies and change them while they sleep.

The result is much the same as in the previous films, but here the metaphor is one of infection, not murder; the “invasion” here is of the human body, not just of Earth more generally, and its alien origin directly parallels tendencies to see epidemic diseases as coming from elsewhere (as in the “Russian flu” pandemic of the late-19th-century, or the oft-emphasised Chinese origin of COVID-19 more recently).

This is a distinctive difference between The Invasion and its forerunners. Still, a difference isn’t enough to make a good film, and indeed The Invasion is a decidedly disappointing one coming from the director who had made the superb Downfall (2004) only a few years earlier. Problems were recognised before its release—after Hirschbiegel had finished filming The Invasion, Warner Bros. was so dissatisfied that it brought in the Wachowskis (riding high at the time on the success of The Matrix trilogy) to rewrite it; later another director, James McTeigue (who’d worked with the Wachowskis on The Matrix films and recently made his directorial debut with 2005’s V for Vendetta which they wrote) was also recruited to redo some of Hirschbiegel’s work.

Reportedly the alterations made included the addition of more action scenes and a change to the ending, in which case perhaps the reworking only made matters worse. High-octane action is not what the unsettling storyline of Body Snatchers calls for, and the conclusion of the released Invasion is one of its weakest points.

In any case, what we’re left with is generally regarded as the least effective of the four Body Snatchers movies. I would choose Philip Kaufman’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) as the best, followed by Abel Ferrara’s Body Snatchers (1993) and then Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), although many people would doubtless argue that the Siegel is superior to the Ferrara—and either way, the former deserves recognition as a very significant film in the history of horror.

The four films progressively departed further and further from the Finney novel, in their settings and many plot details. Where the novel and the Siegel film had both been set in small towns, for example, Kaufman transposed the action to San Francisco, Ferrara set his almost entirely on a military base, and The Invasion returns to the big city with its Washington D.C location. The doctor in the novel and the first film became a public health inspector in Kaufman’s, then an environmental scientist for Ferrara, and finally a psychiatrist for this movie (arguably—the roles are not exactly equivalent because the plots aren’t). Still, some similar scenes and moments reappear, in variant forms, in all four films.

We first meet The Invasion‘s protagonist Carol (Nicole Kidman) in an action-led scene that strongly resembles zombie-apocalypse movies, frantically searching the shelves of an already-ransacked pharmacy for something to keep her awake, then discovering what seems to be a group of people locked in a storeroom. The many questions this scene might raise are quickly dispelled, however, by a painstaking explanation of exactly what’s happened, relying in part on faux TV news footage and in part on the character Tucker (Jeremy Northam), an employee of the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC), in a passage just as strongly reminiscent of epidemic-disaster films like Wolfgang Petersen’s Outbreak (1995). A space shuttle has crashed (rather unconvincingly) and brought with it alien spores.

Revealing this so quickly robs The Invasion of the mystery which sustains all three other adaptations for some time, although of course many—perhaps most—audiences would have been aware of the alien-spore premise before watching the film. It does go through the motions of revealing the truth slowly to Carol, for example in a scene overtly echoing earlier versions where her patient Wendy (Veronica Cartwright, who also appeared in a different role in the Kaufman film) complains that “my husband is not my husband”. But to a large extent, The Invasion prefers to get the basic facts out of the way and then focus on the personal experience of Carol, her young son Ollie (Jackson Bond) and her doctor friend Ben (Daniel Craig) rather than spend time on slowly unfolding what has happened.

Some of how the Body Snatchers concept is developed is undeniably clever. The effects of the alien spores are attributed to a form of flu, so a vaccination programme is initiated—but the real purpose of the “vaccination” is to take over recipients’ bodies. (No specific mention is made of Bill Gates gaining control over their minds.) And the worldwide impact of the alien usurpation is imaginatively suggested: the pod people’s conformity means an end to conflict, so we hear about India and Pakistan making peace, and North Korea disarming.

The exact nature of the alien society is something none of the preceding movies had explored much (though Kaufman did imply that the alien invaders would continue with our economic system because they had to), and might have made for a fascinatingly different take on Body Snatchers, but these details are passed by in a hectic rush: indeed there is virtually no breathing space in The Invasion until a scene some way in where Carol and Ben attend a diplomatic dinner party and she takes part in some philosophical discussion with the Russian ambassador (Roger Rees), blatantly designed to make clear some Body Snatchers themes.

(Incidentally, the name of the Czech diplomat Belicec at this party is another nod back to the novel and the first film, though the character bearing it there is quite different – while The Invasion departs from the Finney/Siegel/Kaufman model just as much as the 1993 Ferrara film did, it is nevertheless careful to establish linkages with its predecessors.)

The Invasion isn’t without style at times. There is the occasional good composition (for example young Ollie against a blood-spattered wall) and some nice if slightly obvious use of shop-window mannequins, though the microscope images of the alien infection taking place at the cellular level are unnecessary. Doubtless intended to give the story an aura of scientific credibility, they further detract from the threat by making it comprehensible and reducible to a physical process. The very disorienting early shots in the pharmacy—the fizzing lights matching Carol’s panic—are powerful in creating a sense of collapsing order, even if this appears to contradict the central Body Snatchers idea that the aliens are going to impose too much order on human life.

Indeed, much of the film is oddly lacking in any real sense of peril precisely because the peril is ill-defined. Is it violence and mayhem, or total, stultifying regimentation? It can’t be both. The infected person posing as a census worker who tries to attack Carol resembles a crazed killer and therefore lacks the menace of the super-calm pod people in the earlier films, for example, and though there are some well-handled touches of weirdness—a woman crying in the street, another woman shrieking that “we’ve gotta warn people” (also a nod to earlier versions), a group of infected waiting stiffly at a bus stop, two waiters vomiting in perfect synchrony—there are also other scenes where over-aggressiveness again undermines the portrayal of the infected.

The action, more than in previous Body Snatchers movies, doesn’t make up for this. A subway episode, which seems intended to be an action highlight, is both unthreatening and unexciting; it doesn’t help plausibility, either, that Carol just happens to find a handgun in an empty room during this sequence, just as she and Ben will later just happen to find a police car too. Near the end, Ben’s colleague Stephen (Jeffrey Wright) in a helicopter is an almost literal deus ex machina.

There is also a certain amount of telling rather than showing: at one point Stephen explains everything, at another point Carol and Ben stop in her office so he can explain some medical ideas to her, and Stephen and Ben discuss the finer points of vaccination on the phone. (Finney himself said that he thought clarifying the exact details of the alien invasion would harm the storytelling.) More minor flaws in the writing, meanwhile, are perhaps a symptom of The Invasion‘s rewrites. Carol says Ollie has been having nightmares since he learned he was going to see his absent father again, but this isn’t so; we witness him having one before this. Ben tells Carol she can “easily go for a week without any sleep”, which simply isn’t true—she would be seriously unwell if she even managed to achieve this, and he is supposed to be a doctor…

John Ottman’s score is a little predictable and not very noticeable, but a couple of performances do stand out—Bond as Ollie, and Wright (American Fiction) as Stephen. Unfortunately, the central figures of Ben and Carol themselves are less engaging. Both tend toward the one-note—Kidman anxious, Craig reassuring—and their relationship is uninteresting: their initial status as best friends seems a plotting convenience rather than a believable reality, while their trajectory from best friends to something more is almost unnoticeable amid all the energetic activity. None of the human interactions in The Invasion are very interesting.

All the Body Snatchers films are interested in ideas as well as people, of course; and the fundamental fear throughout them is the diminution of our humanity. Presumably, in the world of the pod people, there are less intense highs and lows, there is little if any art or creativity, and there is some loss (exactly how much is unclear) of free will. But they all approach the horror of the situation in different ways. For example, both the Ferrara and Kaufman versions also stress the fear of being left alone in the world, familiar from apocalyptic films of all kinds (“there’s no-one like you left” is the ambiguous last line of the Ferrara, and the Kaufman ends on a famous, chilling image to the same effect); this barely figures in The Invasion as released, though it might have in Hirschbiegel’s first version.

There are differences in the atmosphere as well. Ferrara’s version is almost sensuous, richly lit, with sexual undertones not only in some of the human relationships but also in the pod people themselves. An alternative kind of uneasiness is emphasised in Kaufman’s, particularly through the camerawork, with its disorienting angles, shadows, rapid pans and zooms. The Invasion tries to achieve a similar visual disorientation at times, and Kaufman’s film is perhaps the most direct predecessor of Hirschbiegel’s, with the older movie’s allusions to environmental corruption (“we eat junk and we breathe junk” so we didn’t notice alien contamination) paralleling the disease model in the later one: both pollution and microbes are akin to invisible poisons.

But there’s also, as a result of the pod people’s arrival, an end to many of the things we consider bad… and this is spelt out more overtly in The Invasion than in the other films when it shows long-running global problems being suddenly resolved. This is not, of course, presented as a positive: as the Russian ambassador tells Carol, a world without strife would be “a world where human beings cease to be human”. Yet the replaced or infected humans might well be gaining “happiness” of a limited sort, perhaps better called “contentment” (somewhat as in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World), and indeed this is something the pod people themselves repeatedly stress.

The trade-off between freedom and a safe, predictable existence is more explicit in The Invasion than in any of the other films, but all of its predecessors in different ways suggest resemblances between the pod people and human societies or institutions which value security over liberty. So, in the Siegel original, the rigorously organised, efficient, inhuman others were implicitly communists; in the Kaufman, they perhaps represented conservatives in opposition to the San Francisco counterculture; in the Ferrara, the aliens first took over the military, already the ultimate example of rigid organisation in our society, and that film could be seen partially as a comment on the perils of a militaristic mindset.

The Invasion, despite bringing the global implications of the Pod People’s invasion into the spotlight, does not make this kind of politically charged comparison (unless you view the Pod People as an oppressive patriarchy; there is an argument that it’s a feminist film). By the time it was made, neither communism nor repressive conservatism was an imminent worry for most people in the West. But after 9/11, the Y2K scare, the SARS outbreak of 2002-04 and so on, the collapse of their comfortable existence seemed to be becoming more of a nagging possibility.

It’s this that The Invasion plays on— as well as the specific concern that disease could be the agent of disaster—and at the same time, it works with more conventional threats to the family unit, partly in the form of the pod people wanting to kill Ollie, but more significantly in Carol’s ex-husband wanting to take him.

So, while The Invasion doesn’t draw a clear line between the pod people and totalitarianism as the earlier films did, it still has two good, strong narrative ideas to exploit: on the macro scale the threat to civilisation and its values, on the micro-scale the threat to the family. All the previous films had used the idea of sudden problems within the family to illustrate the impact of the alien takeover (it’s among partners or family members that the pod people are first spotted), but none before Hirschbiegel’s had made family issues so central or so emotive.

The trouble, however, is that The Invasion seems undecided about what it wants us to worry about—the collapse of order, the imposition of excessive order, or the separation of mother from child. The result is a film which might have worked quite well as a standalone action thriller about infectious disease shattering society in general and one family in particular, but where the Body Snatchers link seems tenuous and inconsistent.

There are some good things: a few of the performances, a few individual scenes, some of the paranoia. Overall, though, it doesn’t convince me. It’s heavily weakened by an abrupt change of mood in a seemingly tacked-on ending, and the feminist position it sometimes seems to be taking (particularly in its depiction of violence against women, including one very rape-like scene) is diluted by the way that it is mostly men, not Carol, to whom solving the big problem falls; Ben to whom she goes straight away when she needs help; men who rescue her and Ollie toward the end; and so on.

To be fair, it’s difficult to be certain how much derives from the rewrite and reshoot, rather than Hirschbiegel’s original vision. But the biggest problem with The Invasion as released is that it takes the Body Snatchers premise in directions that don’t suit it. It tries to be an action movie about society collapsing and a paranoid one about society becoming more organised and controlled at the same time, and it can’t reconcile these two pulls in opposite directions. It was surely never going to be an exact replicant of the earlier films, and perhaps there was something great gestating in Hirschbiegel’s pod, but what finally emerged was more of a malformed mutation.

USA • AUSTRALIA | 2007 | 99 MINUTES | 1.85:1 | COLOUR | ENGLISH • RUSSIAN

Limited Edition 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray Special Features:

• 4K (2160p) Ultra HD Blu-ray presentation in Dolby Vision (HDR10 compatible).
  Nothing to say here, really; it is, of course, a relatively recent movie (though shot on film) so there are no issues with the quality of an old print, and everything comes across clearly and brightly.
• Original lossless DTS-HD MA 5.1 audio.
• Optional English subtitles.
• NEW Audio commentary by Andrea Subissati and Alexandra West. The film critics and co-hosts of the Faculty of Horror podcast are lively and enthusiastic throughout the very listenable commentary— perhaps a tad more enthusiastic than the film really warrants, although they are also pretty perceptive about the weaknesses and the things that do not make sense.
• NEW Body Snatchers and Beyond. Film scholar Alexandra Heller-Nicholas (recently seen in Kier-La Janisse’s excellent Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror, 2020) covers all four Body Snatchers movies in this visual essay; her delivery is a bit flat and deadpan but she’s good on the themes and context of the films.
• NEW That Bug That’s Going Around. Here’s an intriguing idea from film academic Josh Nelson (a former staffer at the University of Melbourne, from which city Heller-Nicholas also hails): looking at The Invasion not as a Body Snatchers movie but as a film about pandemics. Nelson makes obvious comparisons to films like Outbreak and Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion (2011) but also highlights several revealing aspects of The Invasion itself—the visual emphasis on mouths, for example. His case is often convincing even if he occasionally stretches the point, for example in drawing a link between the character Tucker and the later Fox News host Tucker Carlson.
• We’ve Been Snatched Before. This 2007 featurette covers the science of infectious diseases and is moderately interesting on that topic, though not particularly enlightening about the film itself.
• Behind the Scenes. This consists of three short promotional films from 2007: The Invasion: A New Story, The Invasion: On the Set, and The Invasion: Snatched, all of them pretty superficial and based on very short interviews with people who worked on the film. On the Set is the best of the three.
• Theatrical trailer. Presciently leads up to the line “you won’t feel a thing”….
• Image gallery. The usual vaguely pointless collection of 36 stills and on-set shots.
• Illustrated collector’s booklet featuring new writing by film critics William Bibbiani and Sally Christie (not received for review).
• Reversible sleeve with newly commissioned artwork by Tommy Pocket.
• Double-sided fold-out poster featuring newly commissioned artwork by Tommy Pocket.
  

Cast & Crew

director: Oliver Hirschbiegel.
writer: David Kajganich (based on the novel ‘The Body Snatchers’ 1954 stories in ‘Colliers’ by Jack Finney).
starring: Nicole Kidman, Daniel Craig, Jeremy Northam, Jackson Bond & Jeffrey Wright.