Yeah, basically it’s PANIC ROOM, and it’s kinda funny to compare Schumacher’s idea of PANIC ROOM to David Fincher’s. In Fincher’s the daughter could look like a boy and ride a scooter, in Schumacher’s she’s a sassy party girl interchangeable with six thousand other characters in modern teen and horror movies. Both movies get respectable, somewhat under-the-radar actors under the ski masks: Fincher had Forest Whitaker and Dwight Yoakum, Schumacher has Ben Mendelsohn from ANIMAL KINGDOM and Dash Mihok from Felicity. Both movies have kind of a teen heartthrob type that played an antagonist in a fighting movie – Jared Leto (My So Called Life, FIGHT CLUB) for Fincher, Cam Gigandet (The O.C., NEVER BACK DOWN) for Schumacher. Surprisingly it’s Fincher’s not Shumacher’s, that has a white guy with corn rows.

It’s mostly what you expect: home invaders pushing the couple around, roughing them up, the backstory and identity of the thieves slowly revealed through dialogue and flashbacks, the couple being shamed and tested by accusations and information that come out during the whole ordeal. Wait a minute, the wife knows Gigandet? And the husband might be lying about how much money he has? Deep dark secrets, all that shit.

Before everything went down the daughter implied that there was some trouble in their marriage, and they seemed in denial about it. Now, when they need each other most, they’re being pushed apart. etc.

Meanwhile Cage keeps refusing to open the safe and coming up with schemes (including offering to find a buyer for the diamonds they plan to steal from him) and the thieves come up with new ways to threaten him. And of course there’s the whole bit where one thief is really out of control and another thief is more sympathetic and trying to keep things under control, and there’s  a girl thief who has no restraint at all and starts putting on the wife’s dresses and then flips out and panics at the drop of a dime.

I thought the twist at the end was the best part of the movie, so I’ll go ahead and spoil it. SPOILER is what I’m saying. Instead of having some scandalous revelation the twist is that there isn’t anything scandalous. The implied affair between Kidman and Gigandet never happened – he had a thing for her, she rejected him, but the flashbacks were shown to us misleadingly out of context. Cage hiding from his wife that he’d blown all their money? Never happened either. He just convinced the thieves of that to hide the fact that he’d been squirreling away money for his family’s protection. And after all this the family find themselves together on the floor, hugging, even Little Miss I-hate-you-Mom-I’m-going-to-the-party. This nightmare has shown them that things aren’t actually that bad and that they really do love each other. It’s sure not deep, but it’s kinda sweet as far as these things go.

Not only that, but TRESPASS is not very faithful to the original. The whole situation is totally different. It takes out the racial and class tension and also switches it so that the protagonists are the people getting looted instead of the other way around. I guess Cage would be Ice Cube, Kidman would be Ice-T, Gigandet is Bill Paxton and Mihok must be William Sadler. But Cage and Kidman don’t do a song together over the credits so what the hell’s the point?

And then a 10 year old boy (the kid from X-Men 3 [playing a different character {I think I will stop mentioning what other movies they've been in}]) shows up at your apartment and tells you that he’s your dead husband Sean. Hopefully this hasn’t happened to most of you, so just try to imagine what it would be like.

At first you might laugh it off and not want to embarrass the poor kid, he may be emotionally fragile or something. But he keeps showing up and seems to know things. So you go to his parents to tell them to do something about it. And they yell at him but he refuses to say he’ll leave you (Nicole) alone. And then he faints.

So then you feel sorry for him again and invite him over so your family can quiz him and sort of prove to him that he’s not who he says he is. But he keeps passing all the tests.
I mean what the fuck are you gonna do? Is this an uncomfortable situation or what? Aren’t you gonna get creeped out? Not that you are gonna believe this kid is your dead husband reincarnated, but what would possess a kid to pull some shit like this? And how could he do such a good job? I mean jesus. The rational explanation is actually scarier than the supernatural one.

Shit, even if he thought he was your LIVING husband that would be creepy. Or if he thought he was your cousin Jeffrey. Or your former co-worker from when you drove a delivery truck. I don’t care who he thinks he is, a little boy following you around making spurious claims is fucked up. I’m against it.

When I saw this premise explained in the trailer for BIRTH I thought it was about the most asinine thing I ever heard of. But when I saw it unfold on screen in the actual movie, I thought it was absolutely brilliant. This is a completely original and beautifully directed thriller that haunts you for days. It haunts you like a little kid who thinks he’s your dead husband.

And this is definitely a song in the key of Kubrick. Almost as if the director, Jonathan Glazer, has shown up at your penthouse apartment claiming to be your dead favorite director. And he knows things only your dead favorite director would know, like how to open a movie with an awesome tracking shot of a guy jogging through snow forever until he suddenly collapses and dies. I guess since Nicole Kidman is in there, and it’s this antiseptic world of rich New Yorkers, you definitely think of EYES WIDE SHUT. But the whole movie feels like Kubrick in general – the use of classical music, the deliberate pacing, the serious tone with just a hint of dark humor in its uncomfortableness, the confidence to tell a story you’ve never seen in a movie before, and to leave the audience never sure where the hell this is all going.

It doesn’t look or sound like a normal thriller and it never turns into one. It wraps things up with inevitability instead of a crazy twist. It leaves enough ambiguity that you might question your conclusions about what happened. And it asks you some uncomfortable questions, like what if the love of your life really did die and come back in a different body, should you be with them again? Or was it not meant to be? And aren’t you glad this isn’t gonna come up? And it gets even worse because for poor Nicole it not only pours salt on her old emotional wounds, it brings up secrets that she didn’t know about and probaly shouldn’t have. So mostly the movie leaves you feeling for Nicole Kidman’s character. It’s more emotional than your standard Morgan Freeman/Ashley Judd type thriller.

I recommend everybody check this movie out but afterwards, under no circumstances should you read what the chuckleheads on the IMDb message boards are saying about it. I mean I’m used to disagreeing with people on the internet but reading that this great movie is the worst movie somebody ever saw is a shitty way to come down from the high of discovering an amazing under-the-radar movie like this.

[ratings]

So you kind of know right away that this is not gonna be a masterpiece. Either Hirschbeigel’s movie sucked – in which case they’re not gonna be able to fix it just by adding some Wachowski here and there – or maybe the movie was good and Joel Silver just didn’t get it, in which case, fuck. I guess the best thing you can wish for is an ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU where it’s completely crazy anyway and the turmoil probaly added to the magic. (But even in that case the director was replaced after a few days, not after the movie was already done.)

What we get is not a best or worst case scenario, it’s in between. The movie is not good. But it’s pretty fun. They get some mileage from all the things that make the body snatcher concept so creepy: emotionless people walking around like zombies, mindless hordes that you can’t hide from, not always knowing at a glance who’s on your team, knowing you or your loved ones could be next. This version of the story centers on a psychiatrist played by Nicole Kidman, her best friend/doctor played by Daniel Craig, and her son, played by some kid with a bowl cut. Also the great Jeffrey Wright is in there in a generic role as a scientist friend. Unless he is really that CIA agent he played in CASINO ROYALE and he is trailing Bond who is undercover as a doctor while investigating this invasion. If that is the case they should’ve spelled it out more clearly, I didn’t get it.

One thing I appreciate that you don’t usually get in studio genre movies: the shit hits the fan right at the beginning. In the opening scenes we learn of a space shuttle crash, that the debris may be contaminated, and minutes in we are already seeing people who seem to be snatched. It’s a virus that infects you, then when you fall asleep your face grows over with some kind of mucus and you become part of the hive mind by the time you wake up. The hive mind has some kinks to work out though because they are not able to detect the unsnatched walking among them if they act emotionless and avoid excessive sweat.

The bodysnatching is passed like a disease or a 28 DAYS LATER. They puke slime in your face. They are slimepukers. See, it’s a TOTALLY DIFFERENT new take for the post 9-11 world. No pods. IT WILL BLOW YOUR MIND.

The crowd I saw it with laughed alot, sometimes with but sometimes I think at the movie. Nicole Kidman does as good as always, but it’s kind of hard to take her seriously as an everywoman, the surrogate for all humanity. I mean, they just don’t make too many women who look like that. And she doesn’t get too mussed up even though she spends a good chunk of the movie running and fighting while wearing a nice turtleneck sweater, a skirt, pumps, and, from the looks of it, a Wonderbra. I’m probaly a sexist jerk for bringing it up, but those things were distracting in this movie. Later when she gets a chance to change into better alien-fighting clothes, the boobs are still prominent. And then at the end, when everything is better (SPOILER), she changes back into the sweater and skirt. To show that America is not afraid.

Although there was some laughing you also can’t deny that there were alot of effective scares. My favorite scene was when a dude showed up at her door late at night claiming he was from the census bureau. There’s also a good scene where a dog attacks a little bodysnatcher kid. Maybe I’m just a sucker for this type of concept, but I think alot of people are. If you’re going to hold it up to the other versions of the story, which would be reasonable, it won’t hold water. But if you’re able to just watch it as kind of a lesser TWILIGHT ZONE type story it has its charms.

But its main problem is that it’s too easy. It’s short, about 90 minutes, and during this time the whole world is taken over and then untaken over. The heroes figure out who is immune and why in the course of a brief conversation, they speak a bunch of show-offy lingo and then all the sudden they’ve developed a cure off screen. And of course the kid is one of those plucky movie kids who never cries or freaks out, he knows how to stay calm and with it. Part of the creepiness is that you can’t trust anyone, but in this case it turns out you can trust the government scientists, somehow they are safe and have no setbacks at all. Also, I gotta be honest, it would’ve felt more earned if there was some blood. Nicole kills 7 or 8 people, tosses a little kid (wonder if she’s seen WHO CAN KILL A CHILD?) and hammers a guy in the head, but none of it is really shown and none of it really gets you in the stomach. Or at least me. But nice try.

What I’m saying is you gotta earn a cure. These slimepukers pretty much give it to them. They are not good invaders. They suck. So it’s a little anticlimactic.

I’m not sure what the deal is with the Wachowskifying of the movie, but I bet it didn’t improve much. My guess is that the German guy made a more subtle and intimate story that didn’t spell out what was going on in the rest of the world, and the Wachowskis added in the news reports above the virus and the heavy-handed ending where Jeffrey Wright practically looks into the camera, makes eye contact with you, calls you by your full name and explains the ironic ending to you, complete with a question and answer period, followups allowed.

The style of the movie is also a little schizophrenic, I don’t know if that’s by design or from too many cooks. Most of it remains calm, but uses alot of uncomfortable closeups to make you fear what’s going on outside of your view. But in certain scenes it goes to a frantic editing style jumping back and forth in time, using quick cuts of microscopic views of the virus and even throwing in some of the dreaded Avid farts. It’s not bad though and I even kind of liked the end credits, which zoom through a CGI rendition of some cells or something. This type of thing has never been done before except in FIGHT CLUB, the X-MEN movies, HULK and I think maybe one of the GARFIELD movies.

You want SPOILERS, here is a SPOILERS. The Body Snatchers stories have always had political subtext, or at least have been read that way. The modern take is that the slimepukers are unified and are able to create world peace. We hear news reports about various conflicts around the world being resolved. They actually make a pretty good argument, the one and only catch is that they’re gonna kill Nicole’s son, because he’s immune. And also there’s a reference to “President Al-Sadr” in Iraq, but since it is a slimepuker Al-Sadr and not the original guy I think we can let it go. Anyway, the movie ends with Daniel Craig reading a newspaper about the mess in Iraq and Kidman remembering something she heard earlier about how if we didn’t have war and crime and shit we wouldn’t be human.

To be frankly honest I’m not sure what Hirschbeigel/Kajganich/McTeigue/Wachowski/Wachowski (from here on referred to as ‘Joel Silver’) were going for here. Is she supposed to be thinking “Shit, maybe I shouldn’t have stopped The Invasion”? Or is it saying, “We’re only human, you can’t blame us for fucking up the world, there’s no sense in trying to do better”? Or maybe it’s supposed to be ambiguous. I just hope it’s not option B, because that’s a depressingly cynical excuse for human failure and laziness. I dare you to try that one on Morpheus. That man killed an SUV with a sword, how dare you disrespect him like that. Besides, if humanity is so bad at getting along then how the hell did the US government so quickly and easily put together an uninfected scientific super-team and cure most of the world in the span of one short montage? I guess it figures that the one and only time the Bush government worked like a well-oiled machine would be the time they were stopping aliens from creating world peace and harmony.

So anyway, if you were expecting a hilarious disaster of Nic Cage proportions, no luck. If you’re hoping for topnotch intelligent sci-fi, well, its not that either. But it’s fairly unsettling, it’s hard to hate this cast and like I said, she tosses a kid in one part. You could do worse.

Originally published at Aint-It-Cool-News: http://www.aintitcool.com/node/33677

[ratings]

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