In “The Invasion,” it’s not Nicole Kidman’s body that seems to have been snatched. It’s her face.
Playing a heroic psychiatrist in this sci-fi thriller remake, she’s nearly the last person in the greater Washington-Baltimore area not to have been taken over by a weird live virus from outer space that turns everyone infected by it into an expressionless automaton of groupthink. And yet ironically, the actress playing protagonist Carol Bennell has the picture’s most supernaturally immobilized expression.
As you sit through this empty-calorie popcorn movie, there’s still plenty of brain space available to consider a conundrum more interesting than the script: What’s more freaky, a mass internal incursion of the population by alien spores or a desperate 40-year-old star’s overuse of Botox?
Today’s fourth feature adaptation of Jack Finney’s 1955 novel “The Body Snatchers” — which spawned Don Siegel’s original all-time classic 1956 B-movie “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” and then a whole zombie-epidemic sub-genre from “The Stepford Wives” to the recent “28 Days” movies — is a pointless action-oriented reworking of a concept that has become hackneyed over the years.
Director Oliver Hirschbiegel and screenwriter David Kajganich, with an officially uncredited rewrite by the Wachowski brothers (of the “Matrix” movies), create a modernized rip-off that leaves out the very thing that made the first one a masterpiece. The 1956 picture endures because of its allegorical power. It was a chilling metaphor for its time representing either “red scare” McCarthyism or the encroaching menace of communism — open to interpretation depending on whether you came to the piece from either the political left or right, respectively.
“The Invasion” lacks those layers of relevance, so it also lacks that ability to get under the skin and truly frighten. The story follows the familiar body-snatching template: Heroine is slowly surrounded by former humans-turned-“pod people” — in this case, actually, spore people. Aided by a cute love interest (Daniel Craig), heroine runs around frantically trying not to become one too while trying to save her son (Jackson Bond).
There are two unique thematic twists in this variation. Though the filmmakers fail to take advantage of the comic possibilities in this era of pervasive divorce, it is Carol’s already icky ex-husband (Jeremy Northam) and ex-mother-in-law who serve as the main zombie villains here. In addition, the movie lamely attempts to have a Big Social Message about war and global poverty being the price we pay for our humanness and individuality. If we want peace and prosperity, it bleakly suggests, we’d all have to be mindless extraterrestrials.
But as set in and partly filmed in D.C. and Charm City, with Hollywood’s usual geographical bastardizations of neighborhoods like Georgetown and Cleveland Park, “The Invasion” is as mindless as most of its characters.
‘The Invasion’
*
Starring: Nicole Kidman, Daniel Craig, Jeremy Northam
Director: Oliver Hirschbiegel
Rated R for language
Running time: 99 minutes
