The Reel Man: The Invasion

Director: Oliver Hirschbiegel
Rating: R
Run Time: 93 minutes
Trailer: Click here to view
The Reel Man: 2 reels
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On its surface, The Invasion is just another summer horror flick. But as much as the original 1956 adaptation of Jack Finney’s novel Invasion of the Body Snatchers was a parable about the threat of communism, director Oliver Hirschbiegel’s updated remake is about the threat of terrorism and its effect on the American psyche. Unfortunately for the hopeful science fiction geeks (myself included), it is not entirely successful.

Nicole Kidman stars as Carol Bennell, a Washington, D.C. psychiatrist and single mother who soon finds herself in the minority of people whose mind and body have not been “hijacked” by an alien endospore brought to earth by a doomed space shuttle (not so accidentally named Patriot). Once a person is infected with the extraterrestrial bacteria, a metamorphosis occurs during REM sleep, yielding their will to that of the invaders.

In a nod to the 1978 film (a remake as well) for which she also guest starred, perennial alien horror movie actress Veronica Cartwright plays Wendy Lenk, a patient of Bennell’s who is one of the first people to notice that something is not right. At her regular therapy appointment, she anxiously explains, “My husband is not my husband.” When Bennell’s ex-husband begins to exhibit odd behavior, posing a threat to her and their son, Carol finds support in friend and romantic interest, Ben Driscoll, played by the current James Bond, Daniel Craig. What follows is a familiar plot that leads to a sudden and unsatisfying conclusion.

Thematically, The Invasion hopes to be a comment on our times. It examines our collective fear through the lens of post-9/11 America. That by now ubiquitous paranoia that fills the vacuum left behind by the end of the Cold War. With “terrorism” on the verge of surpassing “the” as the most common word in the English lexicon (or at least in the news media and State of the Union Address), we’ve come to suspect as “evildoers” the pedestrians we pass on the street, the passengers we sit next to on the commuter train or who stand in line at the airport security check, impatiently watching their carry-ons pass through the X-ray machine. To quote Carol Anne's (from Poltergeist) indelible observation: “They’re here.”

But The Invasion offers only a weak cinematic discourse on the subject and it is much too self-conscious. It redundantly reminds us of the September 11th vantage point that it’s coming from. Much like the hijacked planes of the terrorist attacks, here the space shuttle is hijacked and sent crashing to the ground, delivering the alien endospores to Earth. And standing atop a building surrounded by the infected, a couple leaps to their death while holding hands, an obvious allusion to the World Trade Center victims who tragically jumped to escape the inferno. The "War On Terrorism" gets an "honorable mention" in the form of looped radio and television news reports about the Iraq War and North Korea.

There are several spots in The Invasion where it seems as though a scene has been cut, as if we must piece together what happened during the two minutes we missed on a trip to the restroom. Indeed, there are scenes absent. Dissatisfied with the film as delivered by Hirschbiegel (who also directed the Oscar nominated Downfall), the studio hired the Wachowski brothers and James McTeigue for reshoots. Although such recasting of significant production roles does not always mean disaster (the highest grossing film of all time Gone With The Wind changed directors), such an outcome is a rarity.

But there is an interesting argument made by the film about those handy portable devices we all carry: cell phones. Driscoll reminds Bennell of a trip they took to the Aspen Grove in Colorado and how it made her ponder what the world would be like if "people lived like trees, completely connected to each other as one.” In contrast to this, the saturated use of cell phones in the film suggests that despite putting us more in contact with one another, they actually serve to distance us by dissolving the impetus we would otherwise have for some quality face-to-face time. Our iPhones and Blackberries enable us to have more frequent conversations that often amount to nothing more than chatter, lacking any real substance and meaning.

But in a point of view seemingly sponsored by the Church of Scientology, The Invasion puts psychiatry on trial. Humans infected with the virus are without emotion, their mood is flat-lined. But Carol's converted ex-husband argues the same was true before the aliens arrived. Being a psychiatrist, Bennell writes out the gamut of prescription medication to her patients. And when Bennell is on the run, she seeks refuge in, where else, a drug store.

While The Invasion offers some genuine scares, these are undercut by some unintentional laughs. For example, during a press conference, two aliens vomit into pots of coffee to contaminate it with their endospore. Wouldn’t it have made more sense to do that in the kitchen where there’s no one around to witness it? Maybe they’ve never seen a Folgers commercial. As a result, the scene plays like something out of a Saturday Night Live sketch.

There is also the small but distracting matter of product placement. Perhaps it helped finance all those reshoots. To avoid being taken over by the alien virus coursing through her blood stream, Bennell must stay awake, but she chooses to drink only Pepsi products. Sure, Coke is caffeinated too, but I guess it just doesn’t taste as good as Mountain Dew. And when the very survival of the human race is at stake, there’s nothing more important than taste.

Finally, without spoiling the ending, I'll offer only that it includes an unnecessary bit of exposition that states explicitly what the subtext is. It’s a flaw even in the last minutes of Hitchcock’s Psycho. A good film (even a bad one) doesn’t require a college lecture at the end.