The Invasion

I, Pod

The Invasion
USA/Australia 2007
Directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel
and James McTeigue (uncredited)
Warner Brothers Blu Ray Zone B

Okay, so here we are at the tail end of ‘Body Snatchers Week’ on the blog with the fourth and, at time of writing, last of the big screen adaptations of Jack Finney’s serialised sci-fi novel, The Body Snatchers. At least, the final ‘official’ adaptation at any rate, there have been a lot of movies suddenly springing up over the last few years which have more or less stolen the basic concept and did their own thing with it. So yeah, this is the fourth version after the 1956 Invasion Of The Body Snatchers (reviewed here), the 1978 Invasion Of The Body Snatchers (reviewed here) and the 1993 Body Snatchers (reviewed here). This one is just called The Invasion and, I guess if this is the trend now of sequel titles, when they decide to do it again the only word they’ll be left with is... Of. That’d make a great title for a film about duplicates replacing humans... better than Us at any rate. ;-)

Now, I understand there were problems on this in terms of the suits (or shall we just call them what they are, ‘pods’) at Warner Brothers not liking the cut that Hirschbiegel delivered. So there were rewrites and reshoots with another, uncredited director in the form of McTeigue. This may explain why, at least over here in the UK and from what I can remember, there was no fanfare or publicity for the movie and its cinematic legacy. I think I may have seen a trailer for The Invasion the week before at the cinema or, most likely, saw the title of a new science fiction film starring Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig listed in my local paper... and decided to go along as there was nothing better on.

I remember sitting in the cinema as the movie opened on a scene from towards the end of the film which is foreshadowing the action to come before putting the title card up and then going back to... how it all started. So I was sitting in the cinema and not expecting any familiarity with the story but, I get about ten seconds into the film when I realise Nicole Kidman’s character is looking for drugs to keep herself awake, I put two and two together with the title of the movie and think to myself... ‘No way! Surely this isn’t yet another remake... I didn’t know it was even being done again?’ So I sit tight and wait for about 5 mins and, yep, the main character names confirm what I already suspected a few minutes earlier... this was definitely a fourth version of The Body Snatchers. Except, and I loved this, they flipped the genders so, instead of Kevin McCarthy playing ‘Miles’ Bennell and Dana Wynter playing ‘Becky’ Driscoll, we had Nicole Kidman playing psychiatrist ‘Carol’ Bennell and Daniel Craig playing her doctor friend ‘Ben’ Driscoll. Which, given the fact that we were now onto the fourth version of the story, I was not bothered by in the least.

Other notable people in the film are Jeremy Northam, playing Carol’s ex-husband Tucker Kaufman (presumably named after director/writer Philip Kaufman, who helmed the 1978 edition) and future Felix Leiter, Jeffrey Wright, as a chemical doctor friend of Ben. When the film was being shot, Daniel Craig was given the role of James Bond and had to halt filming for a few days to fly over and do a press conference about it over here in the UK.

Now, I know this film is probably the most hated by fans of the Body Snatchers movies but, honestly, I don’t think this is a bad film and it’s no worse... possibly even better... than the previous version directed by Abel Ferrera. It does, however, have its problems. It does things a little differently too, while staying almost exactly the same and... I don’t think this is a bad attempt. I do wonder, though, at the hasty soul who typed in a big paragraph in the trivia section of the IMDB listing all the ways this film adds new ideas to the original concept... before listing almost entirely ideas that were already there in the previous versions. It’s almost like the person who wrote that entry didn’t actually see any of the other films. Bit strange.

The one thing this does do slightly differently... and this is a bit of a loss to all the people who loved the prior three... is to get rid of the actual seed pods. These aren’t space spores drifting and finding our planet before growing clones of us and absorbing our intelligence... instead, after a space shuttle that has somehow come into contact with the source in space before crash landing back on Earth, it spreads itself as a virus and replaces our body ‘on site’, as it were. However, it does still need the host human to go to sleep before it can take it over and so the mechanism is essentially the same, just the delivery is a little different. When a human goes to sleep and is cocooned within its own biological material, it also looks just like the unfinished pod people from the 1978 version too.

So instead of growing a huge, novelty seed pod in your immediate vicinity, the alien versions of us here just vomit into our coffee or even onto us to get the dormant aliens into us. This gives us the bizarrely ‘out of place for commercial cinema’ moment where we have Jeremy Northam vomiting all over Nicole Kidman’s face and in her mouth, which also makes her the second Bennell in the movie versions to be actually ‘infected’ by the aliens... although with a much different result to what happened when Donald Sutherland was ‘podded up’ nearly 30 years before. And, of course, Jeremy Northam, who I always think of as the modern Cary Grant, plays a pod person quite well. Although, it has to be said, the aliens in this movie seem really dumb and easy to detect.

The writers and directors haven’t forgotten their long cinematic heritage either. For starters, one of Carol’s patients is played by Veronica Cartwright, who was in the 1970s incarnation of the film (and who is also famous for appearing in such films as The Birds and A L I E N). There’s also the nice moment where an old lady does the whole Kevin McArthy thing of running through all the cars and screaming about the aliens as a foreshadowing technique, before being run over and killed. It’s a shame they didn’t tap McCarthy to pick up this scene again but, you can’t have everything. There’s a nice moment later in the film where Nicole Kidman almost repeats the entire scene, which is a nice moment... from one Bennell to another. And another nod to the original is a scene which is a fourth version... although with people and not pods this time around... of the town square distribution scene. So that’s always nice.

The direction and editing is... somewhat problematic but there’s some nice cinematography in this, with some nice colours and framing, especially in the exterior city scenes when it’s raining at night. There’s also a bizarre, Dario Argento kind of moment where, when Nicole Kidman’s character starts to succumb to sleep a few times and the director switches to close ups of the white cells in her blood being swaddled by the alien virus.

The paranoia of the piece is fairly well done too, with a camera walk with Kidman’s character following her on her way to the office, taking in all the hustle and bustle of the people clashing against each other on their daily routine, contrasted later on in the film with more or less exactly the same sequence of shots... but showing all the people nicely behaved, to indicate that by now the majority of the people on the streets are alien hosts. There’s even a tense moment where the director resorts to using the old, boiling, whistling kettle sound in the background to ratchet up the tension... which works pretty much as well as it always does in these kinds of movies.

One of my biggest problems with the film is in the editing. There are four or five moments in the movie where they just start crosscutting between various scenes showing bits from earlier in the movie, bits which are happening now and bits which will happen later on in the movie, in fairly extended but rapidly edited pieces. Maybe its another stab at giving us some foreshadowing but I suspect it’s more a way of excluding bits of explanatory footage which were either missing and not shot... allowing us to get the jump on the next scene as we slide into the middle of the action on that next sequence... or the shot footage was just too slow and boring and they needed to ramp up the pace. Either way, it looks like the editor is trying to be Nicolas Roeg and, honestly, as much as I appreciate that particular directorial genius and his editing decisions, resorting to it here in an almost random manner really doesn’t serve the film and makes you pop out of the experience, as opposed to letting you make visual, metaphorical connections. It just doesn’t work well.

It’s not a total let down though because John Ottman’s score serves the film quite well and is appropriately sinister, helping to build the suspense when the colliding visuals let things down on occasion. Alas, fans of the previous versions of this may find the ‘magic bullet’ of the ending a bit of a bitter pill to swallow, it has to be said. Actually, being as we’re all now in a kind of magical and somewhat ineffective pseudo-lockdown from Coronavirus at the moment, I found it a nice idea that the aliens come up with the plan a third of the way through the picture to infect everybody under the guise of it being a vaccine. That’s a nice idea. I still prefer giant seed pods though, if I was given a choice.

Not much more to say on The Invasion other than... it’s not a terrible film, it’s quite a good one hobbled by some problems which may well have been exacerbated by the reshoots and re-editing job, I suspect. If you like the various Body Snatcher movies and the ideas in them, then there should be no real reason why you shouldn’t have an okay time with this one. I’d have to say, though, that I’m probably not going to rewatch the third or fourth ones as frequently as I’ll revisit the first two in years to come. But still... this is not a bad shot at it.

Invasion Of The Body Snatchers at NUTS4R2

Invasion Of The Body Snatchers (1956)

Invasion Of The Body Snatchers (1978)

Body Snatchers (1993)

The Invasion (2007)

Breaking In

Safe As Houses

Breaking In
2018 USA Directed by James McTeigue
UK cinema release print.

Well this is a shame. Breaking In had a lot of potential to be another great entry into the ‘fired up woman gets feral and tears through the bad guys’ style of thriller but, alas, it fails to live up to that promise for a number of reasons... despite some nice performances from all the key members of the cast.

The story set up is very simple.

After the death of her father, Shaun Russell, played with a lot of style and screen presence by Gabrielle Union, has to return to her ‘once family home’ for the weekend with her two children to settle up some ‘random Hollywood estate agent business’. Except, her father was some kind of criminal mastermind and the house, built like a fortress in terms of security, is on several acres of land. However, what she doesn’t bank on is a gang of four, fairly ruthless criminals who have broken in to try and find the safe which they know contains four million dollars of her fathers money. After some initial violence which leads Shaun outside, the thugs in question take control of the house, along with her kids and it then becomes about her breaking into the house to try and rescue her sprogs before the criminals can kill them and gain access to the loot.

And you’d think that was an okay set up for an entertaining action thriller and, well alright, it is. However, this thing has a fair few problems and I guess I’ll highlight those now.

Okay, so the first thing is... everyone in the script seems to be a walking cliché. Just take the criminals, for instance... we have the guy just doing his job, we have the psychotic one who wants to kills everybody, we have the obvious weak link who wants to just get out without anyone getting hurt and lastly, we have the leader of the pack, who is quite sophisticated and trying to hold everything together so the job can go as smoothly as possible. This last character is called Eddie and he’s played extremely well by Billy Burke. It’s a huge shame he and Gabrielle Union didn’t have a better script to work with here because they both do some good stuff in this and you feel like they just needed a much better role to shine in rather than what they both get landed with in this thing.

The other big problem is that the writers and director telegraph everything so obviously... again, sometimes to the point of cliché. For instance, we have the character who we know from a telephone call is going to be visiting the house later on the evening (two characters who do that, in fact). We have bits of glass that get broken with the director making sure we know there’s lots of glass there which can be used as a makeshift weapon or, you know, a cell phone will be left in an awkward position where you know somebody is going to try and retrieve it before long. There’s a lot of this kind of stuff going on and it just seems like the director is deliberately pushing all the buttons in turn to make the expected conclusion to a scene work with no regard for the intelligence of the audience... which is a great shame. I mean... there’s even a 1970s style, percussive heartbeat used in at least one scene while the film-makers attempt to ratchet up the tension. Seriously?

Oh, and for the record, I know James Bond did it in Thunderball (reviewed here) but I’m not sure hiding behind a dead body is going to shield you from the guns of your enemies. Also, if you’re going to cut someone’s throat, I suspect it’s going to be much more bloodier than a few drops of blood spilled onto your sleeve seen after the fact... and absolutely nowhere else. I don’t think that’s going to cut it these days... especially when you have a 15 rated film which doesn’t seem to have much more ‘adult content’ than you would expect to see in a 12. This is all very strange.

I guess what I’m trying to say there is that, after a very strong opening scene which actually did make me jump,  this is not really treating the material in an edgy or gutsy way for a modern audience. It might have gone down really well in the 1950s but... yeah, not now. The new French movie Revenge (reviewed here), for instance, has a much more potent ‘wild woman on the loose’ dynamic to it than this thing. This one just seems to be a little bit of a sanitised let down, to be honest.

So there you go... all in all, Breaking In is not going to be winning any awards and I felt sorry for the main leads since they were doing some really nice stuff in this. This is a fairly short review and for that I apologise. There has got to be a good movie dealing with breaking into your own place and protecting the children out there but, unfortunately, this is not it. I won’t be seeing this one again.

Survivor

Boom Watch

Survivor
2015  UK/USA
Directed by James McTeigue
UK cinema release print.

Okay, so Survivor is a film I knew nothing about going in other than what I saw in a trailer at the cinema the week before. That much being that it had Pierce Brosnan and Mila Jovovich in it, two very competent actors, playing a deadly game of cat and mouse with the pre-requisite mix of explosions plus running, jumping and shooting that seems to be part and parcel of all modern cinema these days. Fine, no complaints, I like the two leads and so I figured I’d give it a go.

As I watched the movie, it slowly began to dawn on me that this was the same film that I’d heard Brosnan was making about a hit man which was originally going to be called The Watchmaker. Now let’s face it, The Watchmaker is a way better title than the assuredly bland Survivor and how many films are they going to release with this title in the history of the cinema anyway?

So, anyway, this is the story of an American security agent, Kate Abbott (played by Jovovich), who has been relocated to London’s American Embassy to handle security on passport control and, when she gets wind that something is afoot, including a corrupt element on the staff, she is targeted for assassination by someone who calls in Brosnan’s watchmaker character... a highly paid assassin who is also doing another job for the same boss with a tryout in London for a terrorist attack in New York, set for a slightly later date.

And, of course, since Kate has a narrow escape when several colleagues die in an attempt on her life, not to mention being caught with a smoking pistol on the corrupt official who has not been actually revealed to her bosses yet, she has to stay alive while being hunted by both her own people and Brosnan’s ruthless assassin... while finding out what it’s all about and averting the terrorist act Brosnan will try to get away with at the end of the film. Standard set up and a pretty standard action movie, to be fair, but with a nice level of performance from all of the cast, including veterans like Robert Forster and, um, Frances De La Tour (funny how she’s started popping up in everything again these days).

So it’s kind of like a Jason Bourne film but with maybe a bit less intelligence on the part of the main heroine... for some reason she’s been written to not be that much ahead of the game which, I guess, makes things easier for the scripting to keep getting her into hot water with the killer but makes her a slightly less credible security figure in some ways... not Jovovich’s fault though, who does an excellent job. As does Brosnan playing a basic riff on the “hard man” side of his old James Bond character, only with less charm and more ruthlessness than audiences might associate this actor with... although it’s always been something he’s brought to the table in his performances in these kinds of action roles, to be honest.

The direction is very ‘work a day’ with nothing too flashy and a variety of different styles of shooting scenes that bring to mind no immediate signature. Sometimes he’ll go with long swooping shots, other times he’ll go with static shots with various cuts and still other times he’ll switch to hand held camera when it makes sense to do that dramatically or as an echo of the pacing and mental state of the main characters being shown on screen. There’s some nice framing in certain scenes and less obvious, less aesthetically pleasing frame designs in others.

 For instance, the bulk of the action takes place in the heart of London, on streets I know fairly well, and there was a nice piece of framing where Milla Jovovich is walking through Chinatown and the director has taken the shot from a point of view where the vertical posts are all cluttered together and truncating the screen in a whole bunch of sections. This then transitions to a different character coming out of a flat where the fences on the right hand side of the screen echo the verticals thrown up by the previous shot. Then, the main part of where those verticals lead is again echoed as a single vertical splitter in the cut back to the previous character, by now at a different location.

So yeah, there’s some nice stuff going on in certain scenes but, for the most part, it’s a fairly straight, run of the mill action fest and... it’s no worse than a lot of the ones out lately and certainly has some good performances in it, as I said earlier. However, it seems to be set around the Christmas and New Year period and, what with the title change too, I’m guessing this film has had a somewhat delayed release... possibly due to a lack of confidence in it by the producers, I would guess. There would have been no need to worry though.. it holds its own pretty well and I think it would have been better if the studio would have gotten behind it a little more with the marketing, in all fairness. I wasn't aware of any real push on this and it was a surprise release for me.

One thing which they may be worried about is the baggage that Brosnan brings with him to the role. To be fair, both Brosnan and Jovovich have proven very capable of heading up their own franchises (Jovovich has the Resident Evil series) but I can see how the producers might be wary of having the former James Bond playing a villainous role. As it happens, Brosnan is absolutely fine playing against type but there was one moment, I have to admit, where I think his past role got in there to haunt him... although it’s absolutely not his fault, it was written that way. The thing is, Brosnan goes all the way through the film showing that he’s a) a ruthless killing machine who would end your life rather than leave a witness and b) that he’s not a superman and he does, in fact, fail to kill his prey many times throughout the movie... and it’s not for want of trying. Which is all very well and good except for one little scene involving a stairwell where, I have to say, Brosnan’s character pulls off a stunt which is much more worthy of his earlier, super spy roles and... while nice to watch... I think seems totally out of character for the role and I have to wonder if that particular sequence would have been tooled like that if it had been anyone other than Brosnan doing it. A slight mis-step there, I feel, but a forgivable one seeing as the rest of the film brings it back down to earth in terms of the action sequences fairly well.

Another good thing about this movie is the score by Ilan Eshkeri. He’s not a composer I’m that familiar with and I’m not the biggest fan of electronic, synthesiser scores either... which is what this one is. That being said, this is one of the more effective scores I’ve heard of that nature and it never seems inappropriate to the various on screen antics of the characters, helping to fuel some of the action scenes for sure... giving them a little extra as the baseline and percussion elements kick into overdrive. Such a pity this particular score doesn’t seem to have had a soundtrack release as I would definitely have liked to pick up a CD of this at some point. I’m beginning to come round to the electronic score as a viable alternative to orchestra a little more in later years, I have to say.

And that’s about all I’ve got to say about Survivor. There’s some really clunky dialogue in here, especially at the end of the movie, but the performances are strong, the action is well staged and the editing doesn’t get so confusing that you don’t know what’s going on... which is half the battle these days, it seems to me. Definitely should be a hit with those of you who like action spy thrillers and certainly not the worst work either Brosnan or Jovovich have done. By no means is it a terrible time at the cinema so, if you find yourself at a loose end anytime soon, this movie could be one to go on your “to watch” list, I reckon.