At a Czech-hosted dinner party of bantering colleagues, a Russian diplomat turns to Washington, D.C., psychiatrist Carol Bennell and begins one of the few interesting riffs in “The Invasion,” starring Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig.
In heavily accented English, Yorish (Roger Rees) scolds Kidman’s Carol about the primal nature of man and the conflicts bedeviling the globe.
Humankind is hardly kind. And Americans in particular are incapable of finding peace without taking little pills for what ails us, he says pointedly.
The constant chatter coming from newscasts only supports his arguments. We are a world in a perpetual state of war.
There’s something mildly inspired in having this set-piece tease the conflict many critics thought author Jack Finney was addressing in his 1955 sci-fi novel, “The Body Snatchers,” in the first place – the Cold War.
Unfortunately, its power is fleeting, like a number of promising moments in German director Oliver Hirschbiegel’s middling and muddled return to Finney’s thriller about citizens overtaken by an alien seed.
As they sleep, they’re transformed into emotionless versions of themselves. The uninfected begin to seem psychotic as their numbers dwindle but their well-founded paranoia about loved ones takes root.
My husband is not my husband. My wife is not my wife. Or, in the case of the good doctor Bennell, my secretary is not my secretary.
Set in the present, the movie gets underway when a space shuttle crashes.
The Patriot has strewn debris from Dallas to D.C. That phrase – from Dallas to D.C – is repeated enough to draw a far-from-subtle connection between our sitting president (whom we see in various newscasts playing in the background) and disaster.
Carol’s ex-husband. Tucker, a government honcho, visits a wreckage site. He learns that the shuttle brought back some type of spore. People have been warned not to touch the debris. But this doesn’t stop a young girl from handing Tucker (Jeremy Northam) a piece.
That quickly, he’s infected. And soon, the U.S. government and the media are floating story after story about a flu epidemic and a national move toward innoculation, a plan to speed up the takeover of the title.
Dogs – our friends, our sentinels, our babies – recognize the imposters. Though why they snarl instead of urinate, given the plantlike origins of the invaders, goes unexplained.
“The Invasion” has a frustratingly arrhythmic beat. It’s not the effects-laden action that suffers from this herky-jerkiness. It’s the human ties. One wishes for more from the pairing of Kidman and Craig, moonlighting here as friend and suitor Ben Driscoll.
The filmmakers (and rumor has it there were more than those credited) can’t seem to decide whether audiences know the novel and the movie’s previous incarnations.
Of course, if you’re familiar with the earlier films, “The Invasion” is even less satisfying.
Don Siegel’s 1956 B-movie- style thriller and Philip Kaufman’s 1978 “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” starring Donald Sutherland and Brooke Adams, remain the best.
As cheesy as the original looks today, something in Mill Valley’s Dr. Matthew Bennell and Becky Driscoll’s relationships – to each other, to their friends and their neighbors – still feels tragically vulnerable. And even with its slightly dated critique of ’70s psychobabble, Kaufman and screenwriter W.D. Richter made sure authentic bonds were at stake.
In casting Kidman as a protective mom and putting her character’s son, Oliver, at risk “The Invasion” should rattle just as many nerves. It doesn’t – even with more advanced horror effects. Which poses this question: Can a movie be all adrenaline and still have no rush?
Young Jackson Bond delivers a loving, smart, believable Oliver. He’s the movie’s surprising light. But there are a couple of other beacons in the murk.
Jeffrey Wright plays scientist and friend Steven Galeano. Veronica Cartwright (wonderful in the Kaufman movie), plays one of Bennell’s patients.
The wife of a emotionally abusive man, she recognizes a larger disaster in his new, conciliatory manner.
My husband is not my husband, indeed.
Film critic Lisa Kennedy can be reached at 303-954-1567 or lkennedy@denverpost.com.
“The Invasion”
R for language|1 hour, 33 minutes|SCI-FI REMAKE|Directed by Oliver Hirshbiegel; written by David Kajganich; photography by Rainer Klausmann; starring Nicole Kidman, Daniel Craig, Jeremy Northam, Jackson Bond, Jeffrey Wright|Opens today at area theaters
