Picturenose

Send in the clones…

It had to happen eventually, I suppose - there have now been four versions of Jack Finney’s classic Collier magazine sci-fi/horror serial Invasion of the Body Snatchers brought to the big screen and, unfortunately, Olivier Hirschbiegel’s latest take is the first turkey.

A pity, too, because one might have thought that the director of the brilliant Der Untergang (2004) might well have been able to add more to the ‘pod people’ mythos than this bland, frequently illogical PG-13 effort.

A bit of background - Don Seigel (who was later to make such classics as Dirty Harry (1971), The Beguiled (1971) and Escape from Alcatraz (1979)) gave the world Invasion of the Body Snatchers in 1956, and it’s still an all-time genre masterpeice, with small town doctor Miles Bennell (Kevin McCarthy) returning home to find, slowly but surely, that there’s something ‘wrong’ with his friends and neighbours that he can’t put his finger on - ‘Uncle Ira’s not Uncle Ira’, ‘My husband is not my husband’, ‘My mother is not my mother’. Something is most definitely missing (namely, emotion) and, as Bennell discovers, it’s been stolen by an alien life-form - the pods. They get you when you sleep…

While Siegel’s version was interpreted as anti-Communist at the time, Philip Kaufman’s brilliant 1978 re-working shifted the action to San Francisco and, with a great cast headed by Donald Sutherland as public health inspector Matthew Bennell, moved the focus away from alleged political paranoia to fear of big business and invisible government. As Jack Bellicec (Jeff Goldblum) says at one point: “What’s a conspiracy? Everything.”

The ‘pod people’ themselves were even more terrifying in Kaufman’s version, thanks in no small part to a ‘point and shriek’ innovation by which the replicants signalled the presence of anyone still human, and which provides one of THE most chilling endings, ever.

Abel Ferrara’s 1993 Body Snatchers by and large kept up the good work, with the focus this time shifted to an army base, with the obvious opportunities for military-industrial fears well exploited. Plus, he kept the shriek…

And so to The Invasion. This time around, Nicole Kidman plays psychiatrist Carol Bennell who, along with most of the populated world, becomes aware that a recent disaster involving a US space shuttle may have far wider implications - the craft was carrying an intergalactic spore, as she finds out with the help of boyfriend Ben Driscoll (Daniel Craig) and Dr Stephen Galeano (Jeffrey Wright), which is fact turning the world’s population into emotionless drones. But her son Oliver (Jackson Bond), seems not only to be immune, but may be the only hope for a cure…

And it is this last deus ex machina that really undermines the piece - in much the same way that George A. Romero’s visions of a shambling apocalypse (his Dead films) were never supposed to offer any hope of salvation, Body Snatchers has always been about the end of our species coming not with a bang, but a whimper.

Hirschbiegel does include some clever touches, such as news reports appearing to indicate that a world without emotion might not be such a bad idea, given the end of wars, violence and human agression, but this idea is never explored as fully as it should have been, and all we’re really left with, despite the big cast, is the palest of imitations.

99 mins.