Dir. Oliver Hirschbiegel, US, 2007, 99 mins
Cast: Nicole Kidman, Daniel Craig, Jeremy Northam, Jackson Bond, Jeffrey Wright
Review by Matthew Rodgers
The fourth cinematic version of Jack Finney’s novel 'The Body Snatchers' has, like the victims of The Invasion’s alien parasite, taken on numerous forms through various directing changes, script rewrites and even rumoured Wachowski brothers re-shoots to emerge from the mangled, sticky mess of a production, a film as hollow, wooden and as excitement free as the human form pod people it depicts.
Carol Bennell (Kidman) is a psychiatrist and divorced mother of one who starts to notice that all around her is not well. Very slowly, for someone who is employed to read people, she takes her time registering the regimented behaviour of bus-stop queues and her estranged husband’s sudden desire to play a role in their son’s life. A tragic shuttle crash has led to the spread of an alien organism across the world and it’s up to our charisma free heroine and her scientific buddy Ben (Craig) to put a stop to it.
Unreeling like a make-it-up-as-you-go-along movie The Invasion is a good idea that has been lost on the editing room floor and what we have left is a rushed, jumbled and completely nonsensical lo-fi sci-fi thriller. The story rattles along at a break neck pace, so much so that you can feel the deleted scenes and dropped plot threads vanish through the clunky editing and trimmed running time which ultimately culminates in a complete lack of tension, surely a pre-requisite for an apocalyptic tale of survival against the odds?
Kidman has the only role that doesn’t feel reduced by the films problems but her performance is so vacuous that you get the feeling if the pod-people did manage to change her nobody would spot the difference; her chemistry with Craig is non-existent.
With very few scenes worth mentioning – possibly the tube train ride being the anomaly - and an excruciating coda that the studio must have demanded to salvage the wreck, if you can remember the 1978 Phillip Kaufman version with its brave, bleak ending then this is child’s play by comparison.
Oliver Hirschbiegel still retains the director credit but how much of his film actually remains intact is debatable. The Invasion will probably last little over two weeks on the big-screen and very few people should abduct it from the rental store shelves upon release.
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