Haggisboy
06-10-2007, 10:25 AM
When William Shakespeare wrote the immortal line “that which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet” in Romeo and Juliet, odds are he might have been tempted to reword that line had he borne witness to The Invasion.
Billed as a loose re-telling of The Invasion of the Body Snatchers, this Nicole Kidman vehicle plays out more like a patchwork quilt of sci-fi horror, as if writer Dave Kajganich took a blender and tossed in the original Jack Finney novel, added elements of Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later, and a little of Wolfgang Petersen’s Outbreak to round out the flavour. The end result is a movie that might have appealed to a critic’s sense of charity had it been a low budget independent film with no-name actors vying for a break. However considering that this had the backing of a major studio, features two prominent stars (Kidman and Craig), and actually used The Invasion of the Body Snatchers as its working title during production, and you have a movie that almost screams out for a savaging.
For reasons best known only to Kajganich and director Hirschbiegel, the premise of plant-like alien pods as the catalyst for cloning the human populace is jettisoned in favour of a space-born virus that arrives on Earth via the fuselage of a crashed space shuttle – presumably chosen either to make the story seem more real and plausible or because it offered a way to quickly, easily and cheaply cobble together an ending hinging on a lab-developed vaccine (notice the absence of the word “exciting” there).
The rest of the story is pretty much paint-by-numbers as Kidman plays Carol Bennell, one of only a few folks who clue in fairly early that the people around them are being taken over by an alien force which kicks into morphing high gear during REM sleep – pretty much the only visible plot device retained from the original Body Snatchers premise. From there we are treated to Bennell trying to track down her kid who is staying with his now alien daddy, Bennell fleeing from zombie-like mobs, and Bennell trying to stay awake. Along the way, little is done to capitalize on the feeling of paranoia that fueled the original. Instead the audience is presented with some cheap gun play and a car chase, almost as if to deliberately try and hit a few of those precious formulaic “action beats” that so many popcorn movie scripts call for.
So who is to blame for this poor pastiche of film making? Certainly not Kidman and Craig, who did their best with what they were given to work with. Was it Kajganich’s pedestrian script, Hirschbiegel interpretation, or the result of meddling studio execs who called in director James McTeigue (V for Vendetta) to re-shoot entire scenes they weren’t happy with? Or maybe all of the above?
With all due apologies to the Bard, compost by any other name would still stink, and insofar as compost goes, The Invasion is a heap.
Billed as a loose re-telling of The Invasion of the Body Snatchers, this Nicole Kidman vehicle plays out more like a patchwork quilt of sci-fi horror, as if writer Dave Kajganich took a blender and tossed in the original Jack Finney novel, added elements of Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later, and a little of Wolfgang Petersen’s Outbreak to round out the flavour. The end result is a movie that might have appealed to a critic’s sense of charity had it been a low budget independent film with no-name actors vying for a break. However considering that this had the backing of a major studio, features two prominent stars (Kidman and Craig), and actually used The Invasion of the Body Snatchers as its working title during production, and you have a movie that almost screams out for a savaging.
For reasons best known only to Kajganich and director Hirschbiegel, the premise of plant-like alien pods as the catalyst for cloning the human populace is jettisoned in favour of a space-born virus that arrives on Earth via the fuselage of a crashed space shuttle – presumably chosen either to make the story seem more real and plausible or because it offered a way to quickly, easily and cheaply cobble together an ending hinging on a lab-developed vaccine (notice the absence of the word “exciting” there).
The rest of the story is pretty much paint-by-numbers as Kidman plays Carol Bennell, one of only a few folks who clue in fairly early that the people around them are being taken over by an alien force which kicks into morphing high gear during REM sleep – pretty much the only visible plot device retained from the original Body Snatchers premise. From there we are treated to Bennell trying to track down her kid who is staying with his now alien daddy, Bennell fleeing from zombie-like mobs, and Bennell trying to stay awake. Along the way, little is done to capitalize on the feeling of paranoia that fueled the original. Instead the audience is presented with some cheap gun play and a car chase, almost as if to deliberately try and hit a few of those precious formulaic “action beats” that so many popcorn movie scripts call for.
So who is to blame for this poor pastiche of film making? Certainly not Kidman and Craig, who did their best with what they were given to work with. Was it Kajganich’s pedestrian script, Hirschbiegel interpretation, or the result of meddling studio execs who called in director James McTeigue (V for Vendetta) to re-shoot entire scenes they weren’t happy with? Or maybe all of the above?
With all due apologies to the Bard, compost by any other name would still stink, and insofar as compost goes, The Invasion is a heap.