{Blu-ray Review} A Better World: The Invasion (2007) on UHD

“Maybe it’s that flu that’s been going around.”

We are contractually obligated to get a new adaptation of Jack Finney’s 1955 novel The Body Snatchers every twenty years or so – which also means we’re about due for another one.

The novel was originally serialized in Collier’s magazine in 1954 before being released as a standalone novel in 1955 and adapted to screen for the first time the following year. That first version, called Invasion of the Body Snatchers, is arguably one of the most iconic sci-fi/horror films ever made, while Philip Kaufman’s 1978 remake is often regarded as actually better than the original – it’s been too long since I saw either for me to venture an opinion.

The idea was revisited again in 1993, this time directed by Abel Ferrara and with the title shortened all the way down to just Body Snatchers. That one I’ve never seen. Not content to wait quite two decades, the “fourth, and the least, of the movies made from Jack Finney’s classic science fiction novel” (according to Roger Ebert) hit screens in 2007, and has recently been released on UHD from Arrow Video.

The Invasion and the Legacy of Body Snatchers

Originally slapped with the full Invasion of the Body Snatchers title, this one went through several monikers before finally settling on just The Invasion. This time around, the movie stars Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig (fresh off his first foray as James Bond) and was (mostly) written by David Kajganich and (mostly) directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel, who was a hot item at the time due to his 2004 film Downfall, about the final days of the Third Reich.

What’s with those “mostlies” up there? It turns out that Warner Bros weren’t too happy with the version of the film that Kajganich and Hirschbiegel initially turned in, which meant that the Wachowski siblings and their frequent collaborate James McTiegue (fresh off V for Vendetta) were brought on to write and direct, respectively, some reshoots. I haven’t done the sleuthing to determine which parts were them but, based on the rest of McTiegue’s filmography, I’m going to guess that he had something to do with the flaming car chase near the end of the movie.

Ultimately, all four of the adaptations of Jack Finney’s novel have diverged from the source material in various ways. In the novel, alien seed pods drift to Earth and infiltrate a little town call Mill Valley in California. There, they create perfect physical duplicates of the town’s inhabitants, albeit ones that are incapable of emotion.

This is largely reproduced in the 1956 movie adaptation but – an anomaly when comparing films to books, generally speaking – the movie ends on a much bleaker note than its source material. By the 1978 version, the action had moved to San Francisco, and the iconic seed pods from the original had gotten considerably less showy.

I can’t tell you why I haven’t seen the 1993 version. It sounds extremely up my alley, with a screenplay by Stuart Gordon and Dennis Paoli, a “story by” credit from Larry Cohen, and the unlikely Abel Ferrera in the driver’s seat. What I do know, though, is that it’s still plants and pods, albeit this time on an Alabama military base.

The Invasion and Contagion Horror

The Invasion moves the action to D.C. and nixes the plants and the pods and all of that. Instead, this time it’s an alien virus, which comes to Earth on a crashed space shuttle in an opening sequence featuring some truly laughable CGI.

I couldn’t tell you how accurate any of the science surrounding the alien virus is, but I can tell you that poor Jeffrey Wright gets the unenviable task of explaining it all in an expository infodump so complete that it feels like he’s reading off the back of the DVD.

According to Wikipedia, these changes made the movie “different enough for the studio to see the project as an original conception,” never mind the fact that there’s still a “based on the novel by Jack Finney” credit. By swapping out the pods for contagion horror, The Invasion does feel a bit ahead of its time. The scenes where the “pod people” of this movie infect others by essentially vomiting into their faces certainly play differently in a post-COVID world than they probably did in 2007.

And speaking of things that play differently now than they probably did then, it’s certainly worth mentioning that one of the main villains of the piece is a highly placed member of the CDC, who is using a campaign of inoculating people against the flu to spread the alien infection, a note that carries some very different connotations in our conspiracy-addled and vaccine-hesitant “post truth” 2024.

Then again, the politics of The Invasion feel a bit muddled even by 2007 standards. This may not be terribly surprising, as Kajganich’s other screenwriting credits include the 2018 remake of Suspiria which, whatever you think of it, can certainly be described as politically muddled.

“You just have to look around our world today to see that power inspires nothing more than the desire to retain it and to eliminate anything that threatens it,” Kajganich has been quoted as saying, regarding the themes The Invasion.

And yet, it’s hard to argue that the movie seems to have a hard time not siding with the “pod people.” Their attempted takeover brings peace to the globe within a matter of days, and the seemingly happy ending is given an attempt at a haunting tang by a replay of the words of a Russian ambassador from earlier in the film, who argued that imagining a world without sectarian violence was to “imagine a world where human beings cease to be human.”

Writing for The New York Times, Manohla Dargis described the film’s politics as “abhorrent,” specifically citing the “creepy ideology” which seems to suggest that “to be human is to be purely and violently self-interested – a pod person of a kind, but with a gun.”

That’s perhaps a strong stance to take, but it’s difficult to deny that The Invasion struggles to add metaphorical oomph to a narrative that has already demonstrated its metaphoric flexibility many times over throughout the years. And, in the process, struggles similarly to justify its own existence.