The Invasion.

"The latest and lamest version of Don Siegel's 1956 pulp classic Invasion of the Body Snatchers (from the Jack Finney novel) might have been an accidental camp classic if its politics weren't so abhorrent and the movie didn't try to hide its ineptitude behind a veil of pomposity," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. "The Invasion lurches and drags and teeters on the brink of death from scene to scene; it plays as if it had been made by someone in a trance, though not a cool one."

"When Nicole Kidman walks down a crowded street, expressionless and emotionless, pretending to be one of the aliens, we know what she's going through, because we've done it. Probably yesterday," writes Mick LaSalle in the San Francisco Chronicle. "The Invasion connects on a gut level in two ways, political and existential. In political terms, it's a metaphor for how all societies periodically go crazy, surrender their discernment for groupthink and behave in cruel ways. In existential terms, it's a frightening reminder of the true nature of life, which we frantically try to gloss over with everything we do, say and create: We're alone. The Invasion, like all versions of this tale, speaks to the human fear of utter and complete isolation."

Updated through 8/23.

In the Stranger, Brendan Kiley reminds us that "the film was redirected and rewritten by James McTeigue and Wachowski Brothers, of the Matrix monolith. Warner Brothers pulled them aboard, apparently, because the original screenplay (by Dave Kajganich) and direction (by Oliver Hirschbiegel) lacked a certain something. Whatever that something was, McTeigue and Wachowski haven't brought it either."

"The good parts of The Invasion are its ideas," writes Stephen Hunter in the Washington Post. "You can certainly see what may have attracted the Wachowskis to the project.... The Invasion is based on that philosophical chestnut, which pitches the dangers and the opportunities of freedom against the peace and soul-killing results of dictatorship. Or call it free will vs necessity. In fact, you can plug in any individual system vs any collective system you want and the movie still works."

"The Invasion tries to update the political relevance of the first film (which treated the body-snatching threat as an allegory for McCarthyism and postwar conformity) with a constant stream of cable-news chatter about the war in Iraq," notes Slate's Dana Stevens. "But in addition to ringing false—did we go to war in Iraq because we're mindless conformists, or because we were fed bad information?—these parallels clash with the movie's ham-handed humanist message."

"The film doesn't so much reflect our post-9/11 fears as it cheaply exploits them, its opportunistic liberal-plugging (rendered via a series of background television news reports paralleling the mounting alien presence) barely connected to the larger alien invasion, thus rendering it the latest in a wearisome line of cut-and-paste attempts at political significance," writes Rob Humanick at Slant.

"Though Hirschbiegel, or whoever, never teases it out, Dave Kajganich's script has within it the makings of the grimmest Invasion yet, suggesting that, hey, maybe the body snatchers have the right idea," writes Keith Phipps at the AV Club. "After all, humanity's not doing the greatest job running the planet. A better film might have pushed this conceit into Strangelove-ian territory."

"Perhaps the most compelling aspect of all the previous Invasions was their willingness to embrace the possibility that humankind might be randomly, fatally screwed," writes Mary Elizabeth Williams in Salon. "This one ultimately eschews nihilism to go chasing a convenient cure.... Our choice, it appears, is to be either gratuitously violent or soullessly brain dead. In reality it doesn't have to be one or the other. The Invasion, after all, manages to be both."

"[I]t remains fascinating how effortlessly the story... manages to dovetail with whatever is troubling in the zeitgeist, which in this case includes worries about global pandemics and the excessive powers of governments gone wild," writes Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times. "This Invasion is aided considerably by having actors of the caliber of Kidman and [Daniel] Craig in the leading roles. Doing the opposite of slumming, both performers put their considerable talent in the service of bringing credibility to a pulp premise that has kept people up at night for more than 50 years and promises to do so for some time into the future."

Earlier: Dennis Harvey (Variety) and Scott Foundas (LA Weekly).

Updates, 8/20: "It's not that The Invasion is bad, but that it is ultimately less interesting than the three films that came earlier," writes Peter Nellhaus.

It "isn't the car wreck one would expect from a movie that might as well bear an Alan Smithee directorial credit," offers Brandon Harris.

Updates, 8/21: "Before we come down too hard on The Invasion for its mixed messages, we should recall that the first film version, Don Siegel's classic Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), also left itself open to opposing interpretations," writes C Jerry Kutner at Bright Lights After Dark. "Does The Invasion work as a horror film? It did for me."

DK Holm, blogging for the Vancouver Voice, seems convinced that the appeal of the role to Kidman is the movie's "knock against Scientology."

Update, 8/23: "What once seemed a foolproof concept—people suddenly changing into soulless pods—has now been reduced to yet another exercise in political finger-pointing," writes Armond White in the New York Press. "When NASA's Patriot Space Mission fails, bringing to Earth a virus that creates political zombies, it exacerbates tension between society's conformists and malcontents (implicitly, Red and Blue staters)."

Posted by dwhudson at August 18, 2007 5:30 AM