DVD Review: Invasion

“One things for sure, it ain’t from around here.”

Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig star in this updating of Invasion of the Body Snatcher sans the pods. This time the alien invader comes in microscopic form but the results are still the same – soulless automatons. You’d think that the film seemed like a good idea but by all accounts tampering by alien hands screwed it all up.

The space shuttle explodes during a failed reentry and scatters debris across the countryside. This debris has a spore on it and when people who are hunting for the remains of the shuttle (some of them to put it on Ebay) the spore infects them. When they enter the REM stage of sleep the alien takes them over and turns them into emotionless soulless creatures. Psychiatrist Carrol Bennell (Nicole Kidman) has taken her young son Oliver (Jackson Bond) to her ex-husband Tucker (Jeremy Northham) for his appointed visit. Unbeknownst to her, Tucker is one of the first one infected and is using his position at the Centers for Disease Control to make sure that the virus is spread. She slowly begins to realize that people are acting strangely and their loved ones are beginning to notice. She teams up with Dr. Ben Driscoll (Daniel Craig) as they try to find Oliver and a cure for the alien virus that is taking over the world. Invasion is a production that has a troubled history. It was supposed to open in June 2006, however the studio was unhappy with how the film tested and had both the Wachowski Brothers and director James McTeigue to reshoot and re-edit portions of the film. From all accounts original director Oliver Hirschbiegel was creating something that really didn’t rely on massive special effects and went more for the creepy factor. You get to see a bit of this in the beginning when the alien menace first takes root. What’s a shame is that we’re not treated to his original vision and the only release is the version that has been tinkered with and released to theater to bomb. In our age of director’s cut are do-overs perhaps Hirschbiegel will get his due as Paul Schraeder eventually did with his Exorcist sequel. I’m not a fan of test audiences getting final call on whether a film is good or not, these can be skewed by numerous factors, and would’ve liked to have seen both products and have decided which version I preferred.

The film is edited strangely thanks to its storied production history. We have a scene where Craig and Kidman are hiding in her offices and talking about escaping the city to hunt for Oliver and then we cut to them escaping in a stolen police car. During this chase we keep cutting back to that previous scene like the chase hasn’t even happened yet. It does things like this just enough to be annoying. I also wonder what the film’s original ending was like since the slam bang action finale seems like it was manufactured to give the film some punch, but to me it felt manufactured (most likely by those directors brought in to “fix” the film). Invasion of the Body Snatchers is a classic of science fiction and this version feels like a watered down, actioned up (tarted up?) version of that classic. The Invasion is presented in anamorphic widescreen (1.85:1) and is enhanced for 16x9 televisions. Special features include the 18-minute “We’ve Been Snatched Before” which looks at this version and back at some of the earlier versions. The 3-minute “A New Story” tells how they updated the story. The 3-minute “On the Set” has some behind-the-scenes footage and the 3-minute “Snatched” looks at the alien effects for the transformations. The film was given a critical and financial drubbing at the box office and it makes me wonder about the wisdom of test audiences since they’re input was supposed to “fix” the damn thing. Like they knew. I would’ve liked to see the original to make up my own mind and wonder if another dip is in the works at some future date, but given the reputation created by the drubbing I highly doubt the studio would invest in one (but thought the same thing about the Exorcist sequel so who knows?). It isn’t really excrement, but it is a disappointment.