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)

Our Kind Of Traitor

Le Carré On Up The Spy Bar

Our Kind Of Traitor
2016 UK Directed by Susanna White 
UK cinema release print.

I’ve not seen all of the Le Carré movie adaptations but, of the ones I have seen, I’ve only thought three of them were really worth watching... The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, The Russia House and The Constant Gardener. The last one I remember seeing was a very popular but, as far as I’m concerned, not so hot adaptation of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (reviewed here). However, I wasn’t going to be put off by one bad experience and, when I saw the trailer to director Susanna White’s new adaptation of Our Kind Of Traitor... well, it looked pretty similar to The Russia House to me and, since it had a stellar cast, to boot, I thought I’d give it a go.

The film is, it turns out, very similar to The Russia House in terms of the plot set up. In this one, Stellan Skarsgård plays Dima, a Russian employed money launderer who needs to get himself and, more importantly, his family, out of Russia fast, before they are all ‘executed’ by the Russian mafia. Fortunately, he has a bargaining chip, a list of names and numbers of bank accounts of prominent members of the British aristocracy who are taking backhanders in order to let the Russian mafia launder their money in a new bank in London. So, yeah... it’s pretty much a documentary of the current British political regime, it would seem to me. Anyway, he needs someone he can trust to act as his liaison with the British secret service and so he picks on a civilian and his wife, who he meets in a bar, to deliver a memory stick and to be an unbiased outsider to the process. The husband and wife he picks are Perry and Gail, who are going through a rough spot in their marriage and who are brought to life on screen, rather well I might add, by Ewan McGregor and Naomie Harris.

When you have Skarsgard in the cast, you know you’ve probably got a quality product in the works... he’s come a long way since he was appearing in stuff like the Swedish sexploitation movie Anita: Swedish Nymphet (aka Anita - The Shocking Account Of A Young Nymphomaniac) opposite Christina Lindberg. I first came across him as an actor myself in the movie The Unbearable Lightness Of Being and, frankly, he’s got to be one of the best living actors in the world. Ewan McGregor is almost always good to watch... I say almost because I’ve still not gotten over how bad Mortdecai was, my new gold standard in the “At least it can’t be as bad as...” sentence finisher... but, yeah, he’s a pretty amazing actor. And Naomie Harris, who is perhaps best known as the new Miss Moneypenny? Well I’ve liked her ever since I first saw her in 28 Days Later and, personally, I think she should headline a load of films. Add to this mix a brilliant supporting cast with such modern day ‘character actor’ giants such as Damian Lewis, Mark Gatiss (doing extremely well here) and Jeremy Northam (the latter being somewhat wasted in screen time, it seemed to me) and you have a film which you’d think would be hard to mess up.

And director Sussana White certainly doesn’t mess it up, it has to be said. Turning in a film in which she manages to maintain the cold war suspense that is the lifeblood of these kind of low key spy thrillers... injecting the deliberate slow pacing with a shot of tension that does just the trick. And it’s a good job she does too because, in terms of the storyline on this one, it seems a very simplistic kind of affair and certainly not the convoluted, twisty turny thriller that one might expect of a novel by John Le Carre. In fact, some of the film’s key sequences are telegraphed far ahead of when the incidents in question actually happen. Now, I’ve not read Le Carré’s novel on which this is based and so, while it’s certainly a temptation to say that this big screen version of it has been somewhat dumbed down for a film audience, I don’t think this is necessarily the case. It could be, of course, but when you have someone like Le Carré and the kind of audience he attracts... why bother.

Luckily for everyone, White has a certain visual panache on display here. She often adds the nice touch of shooting a lead in to the main scene in a voyeuristic, fly on the wall, manner such as viewing her actors and actresses through a foreground frame, like an architectural detail or a window, the frame within a frame allowing us to approach the scene with caution at first, before plunging into the fray. Also, she does some lovely establishing shots which are way longer than they need to be but which give the film a certain leisurely pacing to match the building plot, such as a helicopter shot of a train which stays with the external view and follows it for a while, before taking us into the carriage with the central cast.

The musical score, by Marcelo Zarvos, matches the mood and pacing of the movie perfectly. Although I could have done without the Spanish guitar style moments, the music naturally owes some small debt to the kind of instrumentation shorthand invented, pretty much, by John Barry for the spy genre with films like The IPCRESS File (reviewed here) although, to my tin ear, it sounded even more stylistically closer to Jerry Goldsmith’s score for the aforementioned Le Carré thriller The Russia House. Especially in terms of the baseline rhythms used in certain sections of the movie. Either way, I’ll definitely be putting in an order for the score from Quartet Records, who are just about put this one out on CD. Looking forward to giving that one a few spins as a stand alone listen.

And that’s pretty much it, in terms of Our Kind Of Traitor, as far as I’m concerned. It’s not the greatest of the Le Carré screen adaptations, for sure, but it’s certainly one of the better ones to give a nice atmosphere reminiscent of the kind of spirit found in his books and, despite its simplicity and over obviousness in a few places, I was pretty impressed by this movie, over all. If you’re looking for something more sparingly paced and with much less explosions or car chases than the regular pictures playing in movie houses at the moment, you could do a lot worse than spend an evening in the company of this film. A strong recommendation from me for a film with characters that have a sturdy moral code by which they live their life... something not always found in the murky world of espionage, to be honest.