THE INVASION (2007) is the fourth (and final, the way civilization is going) official movie adaptation of Jack Finney’s The Body Snatchers. I actually reviewed it for The Ain’t It Cool News when it came out, which is one way I can prove it exists. It’s documented! Anyway I after I watched the other three I figured I oughta complete the set.

This one stars A-listers Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig and is the Hollywood debut of acclaimed German director Oliver Hirschbiegel (DAS EXPERIMENT, DOWNFALL), as well as the first movie written by David Kajganich, who later wrote A BIGGER SPLASH, SUSPIRIA and BONES AND ALL for Luca Guadagnino. But it was kind of a fiasco, losing money and getting poor reviews, universally considered the weakest of the four versions. I’m sure we would’ve noticed it was kinda sloppy even if it hadn’t been widely reported that producer Joel Silver thought it wasn’t working and spent $10 million on reshoots written by the Wachowskis and directed by their guy James McTeigue (V FOR VENDETTA, NINJA ASSASSIN). It was delayed over a year and moved from a confident June release to a resigned August one.

And, would you believe it? It doesn’t really work. But it has its moments.

Kidman (BMX BANDITS) stars as Dr. Carol Bennell, a psychiatrist whose workaholic ex-husband Tucker (Jeremy Northam, THE NET) suddenly wants to spend time with their son Oliver (Jackson Bond, KILLER MOVIE), which is not like him. Uh oh. Tucker is a director at the CDC and was on the scene to see (and accidentally touch) the alien spores found on wreckage from a crashed Space Shuttle, so that might have something to do with it.

In this version, I’m afraid, there are no pods. It kinda makes more sense, because the plants infect you and reprogram your DNA, they don’t have to make a copy. And it’s still gross – it grows a slimy layer over your face when you fall asleep. But, #1, I like pods. #2, since we don’t have pods we don’t get to deal with all the fun stuff like the original bodies disintegrating, or encountering their duplicates, or being thrown in the garbage. But the most important reason this is a downgrade is that when they say “my husband is not my husband” it’s not even true. He’s actually the same guy. And can get better, it turns out! He’s just sick. That’s just not as thrilling of a scenario, in my opinion.

Like the doctors in all versions, Carol hears from a patient who believes a loved one is not her loved one. I like that this woman Wendy is played by Veronica Cartwright, and it’s not just a cameo, maybe even a bigger character than she played in the 1978 version. Although she describes a clearly dangerous situation with her husband (Adam LeFevre, JUNGLE 2 JUNGLE), Carol prescribes her pills, seeming just as clueless as the doctor giving pills to the kid in the ’56 version. But she very firmly tells her to call if she’s in trouble, I guess that’s supposed to show her concern.

Later there’s a good scene where Wendy’s husband shows up at Carol’s office looking for her. It’s kinda working on two levels because we know he’s a plant person but from Carol’s point-of-view it’s a dicey abusive stalker type scenario, which is also scary.

The other movies based on this story are all scarier and better for October viewing, but this one actually takes place partly on Halloween. Carol and her friend (Susan Floyd, BIG NIGHT) take the kids trick-or-treating, and the friend’s kid (who by the way has been emotionally distant) gets attacked by a dog and just calmly holds his mouth shut. Also Oliver finds a weird slimy membrane thing while going through his candy, which Carol brings to her biologist best friend/car pool buddy Ben (Craig, LARA CROFT: TOMB RAIDER) and he gets it tested by his colleague Stephen (Jeffrey Wright, Young Indiana Jones and the Mystery of the Blues).

I should mention that there’s more to the dog scene. Dogs can detect these fuckers and will growl at them, just like they do for Terminators. It’s one of the reasons they’re called man’s best friend. Maybe the most shocking alien behavior in the movie is when Wendy’s husband snaps their dog’s neck and casually carries him out to the garbage. This isn’t something we see, it’s a story we hear, but later while fleeing in a car Carol knocks over some garbage cans and a dead dog flies out – so this is something many of them do! (I think this one was in the recycling.)

Also, as I put it in my original review, “they’re facepukers.” Rather than going through all the trouble of harvesting and delivering pods, they just go around puking in your face to infect you. (No, there is not a scene where the heroes spy on the people of the town filling up trucks with puke to distribute to other towns.) The reveal of this is actually one of the best moments of weirdness – at a CDC conference some of the catering staff keep turning around unnaturally and then you see that it’s because they’re puking in the coffee.

Another new element to this adaptation is that everyone’s talking about an extra-powerful strain of the flu going around, and CDC director Tucker announces a supposed inoculation, raising suspicions about how they could already have one. This, of course, feels different after Covid. Back then it was a scary idea for a sci-fi conspiracy, now it’s a thing widely believed by ignorant people and responsible for many deaths. Fortunately the non-alien people in the government (spoiler for the movie THE INVASION) later come up with a cure and save everybody. But not through a vaccine, through dumping chemicals from above, like the naturopathic cure in Seagal’s THE PATRIOT.

Luckily Carol, Ben and Stephen haven’t gotten the shot yet or drank the vomit coffee, they’re on the ground floor thanks to the trick-or-treating sample, and have been cagey about telling the higher ups. When Ben’s Russian ambassador friend Yorish (Roger Rees, THE SCORPION KING) gets sick they witness a transformation first hand and become a band of uninfected trying to save the world. But the main thrust of the movie is Carol trying to rescue her kid from her ex. Also, she briefly made out with Ben but she called it off to protect the friendship and he’s very hardcore about helping her save Oliver, I think he’s auditioning to take it to the next level.

There are people freaking out in traffic trying to get help. There’s car action and running on streets and riding the subway. There’s a good amount of walking around in public trying not to emote or sweat. I like the moments where strangers clandestinely give each other tips about it. And there are lots of creepy stares and head turns from people who obviously ain’t right, plus one incident of weird crawling.

As always, our protagonist has to find ways to stay awake, but Carol doesn’t have access to a Mr. Coffee. Instead she breaks into a drugstore (already looted, though this is not established as a widespread phenomenon) where she’s able to use her pharmaceutical knowledge to find the right pills as well as chug a 2 liter of Mountain Dew. And she makes her kid give her an adrenaline shot to the heart!

It also follows in the tradition of the Siegel and Kaufman versions by having the protagonist dressed way too nice for what’s going on. In those cases it was men wearing suits and ties, as was the culture at the time. Here she’s wearing a nice sweater, skirt and heels while escaping through a subway tunnel.

It’s kind of funny that this famous story of resisting conformity stars two of the most beautiful people on the planet. I mean, how can the same person play the last hold out of the body snatchers and a Stepford Wife without really changing her look? I don’t know, but she’s good, she makes it work.

I appreciate that this version goes a little harder than the others in showing cops as enforcers of the alien agenda. They’re going around violently arresting people who haven’t complied yet. They don’t hint at this at all but in my opinion there’s a very good chance that most of those cops aren’t even infected, they’re just doing their job, and enjoying it.

The biggest update is portraying this more as a pandemic than an alien invasion. That’s how they try to make it feel real. But what are they saying? I had a sinking feeling that it was an anti-psychiatric drugs message, comparing medicine that balances your brain chemistry to alien spores that erase your emotions. It ultimately seems to back away from that, but a parallel is definitely drawn.

The more salient point is its acknowledgment of the possibility that a world of facepukers is in fact better than a world of humans. Wendy may miss the fights she used to have with her husband (because at least he had emotions) but we can’t really knock all the snatched world leaders ending their conflicts! We see news reports about nuclear disarmament treaties, occupations ending, George W. Bush shaking hands with Hugo Chavez, shit like that. So the ironic ending is that Ben and Carol figure out what causes immunity in about one minute of conversation, Stephen uses that to create a cure, everything is resolved very patly, the invasion is thwarted, the infected people who didn’t die even go back to normal, and Carol and Ben seem to be happily married. But also the status quo is restored as far as wars and shit, so Carol is left thinking “What have I done?”

The trouble is, when the facepukers created world peace earlier we already wondered what it meant to be fighting against that. So when the ending plays it like a real shocker of a conundrum that wouldn’t have occurred to you before it really doesn’t land right for me. But I like it intellectually.

Wikipedia refers to it as a “twist ending” devised by the Wachowskis. I had wondered earlier if they wrote the scene where Carol meets Yorish at a party, mainly because he asks, “Can a pill help me understand Iraq, or Darfur, or even New Orleans?,” pointed swipes at Bush that you didn’t expect to see in a big movie at that time. But also because it’s a fancy dinner with fancy people very pleased with themselves and their philosophical banter, like a bunch of Merovingians. I don’t know, the scene seems too big to have been a reshoot, but one of Yorish’s lines does repeat in voiceover to make the point at the end.

At the time, Entertainment Weekly cited “sources close to the production” saying the Wachowskis rewrote “some 30 percent of the movie.” It says “the Wachowskis’ fingerprints are hard to miss on the film’s extra-crunchy car-chase scenes and trippy time-warping jump cuts.” (I did notice propulsive quick cuts in those scenes that stand out from the rest of the movie.) Silver claimed the siblings “didn’t do more than help conceive and envision some action elements.” Hirschbiegel either was okay with the changes or did a good job of playing along. He’s quoted saying “some of their suggestions pissed me off because the pages were just better than what I had shot.”

I don’t think it comes across as a very Wachowski movie at all, but then you see the best action scene and of course it was their idea. Carol’s car gets mobbed by so many spore drones they create a blob of inhumanity on top of the vehicle. And she drives around trying to dump them, it’s crazy.

Back then you might’ve compared that scene to the “burly brawl” from THE MATRIX RELOADED, but now it reminds me of the fast zombie type sequence in THE MATRIX RESURRECTIONS. Whether consciously or not, I think Lana hung on to some of those ideas.

Although there’s some overlap, it doesn’t seem like it’s a matter of the MATRIX action unit moving over to this movie. David Leitch worked on it, but not Chad Stahelski. The stunt coordinator is Keith Adams (KILL BILL) and unfortunately Kidman was injured in a car stunt, like Thurman was.

I agree with the hive-mind that THE INVASION is the worst INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS movie – no question about that. But that’s not a huge insult. Not as good as the others doesn’t mean worthless. It’s kind of incoherent about what the plant people are actually about (for example, they are a hive mind, yet you can fool them into thinking you’re one of them). I also think the choice to go for a “realistic” look means it doesn’t have as much spooky atmosphere as the others, and makes some of the sillier parts stand out more. Like, I had trouble getting over a scene where they’re able to lock some facepukers in a drug store storage room using a latch lock on the outside of the door. For what possible purpose would they have built that? Who were they trying to keep in there? I’m sorry to bring this up so late in the review, but it’s been bothering me. Maybe there was a whole other horror movie going on in this drugstore before the invasion happened.

Despite these issues, I enjoy seeing variations on a good story, and this does take some of the creepy elements we enjoy and put a different spin on them. It got my heart pumping a few times, so I don’t mind that I watched it twice. If humanity should persist, we’re about due for another really good version. Probly a streaming series, though. Until then, we got three really good ones and this okay one.

Additional notes:

Oliver dresses as Superman for Halloween, but for some reason he wears a red domino mask. I was willing to accept it as a weird quirk that either he or Carol thinks Superman wears a mask, but then when I was making a screen grab of it I noticed another kid in the background doing the same thing! I’m so confused. We need a comic book nerd to lecture the wardrobe department.

Craig actually learned he’d be playing 007 while he was filming this, and the movie being postponed meant he was much more famous by the time it came out. Didn’t seem to help much, though.

I was happy to see one scene with Jeff Wincott (PROM NIGHT, MARTIAL LAW 2: UNDERCOVER, MISSION OF JUSTICE) as a transit cop, i.e. an alien. Also Malin Akerman is in a couple scenes as Tucker’s mistreated girlfriend, uncredited because this is before WATCHMEN and/or 27 DRESSES made her known. She had only been in three college movies (THE SKULLS, THE FRATERNITY and THE UTOPIAN SOCIETY) and HAROLD & KUMAR GO TO WHITE CASTLE.

One interesting fact about Hirschbiegel is that I’ve never seen DAS EXPERIMENT but I almost watched it specifically because it got him almost-hired to do the third BLADE movie. But then he decided to do DOWNFALL instead. Bummer. Ya blew it, Hirschbiegel.