The Invasion
Rated: PG-13
Runtime: 1 hour, 33 minutes
Directed by: Oliver Hirschbiegel
Starring:
Nicole Kidman - Carol Bennell
Daniel Craig - Ben Driscoll
Jeremy Northam - Tucker Kaufman
Jackson Bond - Oliver
Jeffrey Wright - Dr. Stephen Galeano
While films that go through multiple directors and find themselves being cut under the scrutiny of fickle test audiences tend to fascinate if only by wondering where one director’s film ends and another’s begins, The Invasion, which essentially switched from German director Oliver Hirschbiegel (Downfall, Das Experiment) to the Wachowski Brothers (The Matrix), creates no such curiosity since the film’s a constant bore and offers nothing beyond what the previous Invasion of the Body Snatchers movies presented.
A U.S. space shuttle crash lands in America and brings with it an new life form. When it ends up infecting the head of the CDC (Jeremy Northam), it demonstrates how laughably awful this film can be. The head of the CDC ends up slicing his hand on a piece of clearly alien-ized debris and then, thinking nothing of it even though he’s been told that there’s an alien organism now on this planet from guys in hazmat-suits, he shrugs it off and goes home. Well, he’s patient zero and from then on, the whole planet begins to transform into an army of emotionless zombies. Only his ex-wife (Nicole Kidman) and her sexually-attractive man-friend (Daniel Craig) can stop the invasion.
Despite its B-movie pedigree, the 1956 Invasion of the Body Snatchers was at least fresh and subversive and didn’t need a lot of special effects nonsense to make the transformations terrifying. If you’re not bored by every telegraphed shot (hey, everything is loud and noisy in this scene but I bet in about forty minutes, everything will be eerily quiet and spooky!) then you’ll be laughing at such classic moments as infected waiters puking the organism into pitchers of coffee or watching Kidman drop-kick a small Asian child. Yes, there will always be an inherent creepiness as we see a zombie flick without the gore but you’d be better off seeing a version that’s not terrible like this one.
I’d be more outraged at the film’s awfulness if I thought it had any potential but The Invasion is a film that only entertains unintentionally and bores constantly. Where does Hirschbiegel’s film end and the Wachowski’s end? The better question is when does the film end so I can leave?
Words by
Matt Goldberg
8.23.07