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)

Top Ten Soundtracks of 2016

When The Note Comes In

Top Ten Contemporary
Score CDs of 2016

Well, it’s that time of year again when people start asking me what I thought the coolest scores of 2016 were and, I’d have to say, I’m kinda disappointed with my list this year. One of the problems with that is I limit myself, quite strictly, to what is allowed to go on this list.

It goes without saying that I don’t include the redundant, vinyl only releases of the year and nor do I include the evils of the electronic download as a viable alternative to the magic of compact disc as the required format for any soundtrack listener worth their sort. So that sort of “but it had a (insert either of the two evil formats here) release" isn’t going to cut it with me. It has to have had a compact disc release in the year the movie came out to be eligible. Something which has scuppered my number one spot this year, as I’ll go on to explain.

Apart from this, my other rule is that the score has to be from a movie released this year in the UK or US. There are gazillions of good archive scores released nowadays from small, boutique labels of restored old scores, most of which would run rings around anybody’s pick of soundtracks from just one year... with this year being no exception. I would love to put a proper listing together for the many resurrected film scores coming out in any year but it would just take me too long to properly compile the damn thing. There are a lot of ‘holy grail’ type releases coming onto the market, often monthly, and there is just so much stuff now getting released that every soundtrack listener’s wallet is under threat... with companies like Intrada, La La Land, Quartet and Varese Sarabande putting out some truly great stuff (although many of my personal Holy Grails seem to have been left untouched... cough cough... The Final Programme, Work Is A Four Letter Word and proper releases of Doc Savage and Blade Runner).

Okay, so my biggest problem with this year’s listing, asides from the fact that it seems to be all American scores this time around, which is not a great thing, is that the score that would easily take the top spot, Cristobal Tapia de Veer’s amazing The Girl With All The Gifts, has not even made it onto one of the lesser useful formats as yet, let alone a nice CD release. This is a shame but I’m going to have to leave it off because, without the CD to give it some ‘stand alone’ context, I really can’t, in good conscience, include it.

So here we go... my top ten score CDs from contemporarily released movies of 2016 in reverse order.

10. Nerve by Rob Simonsen
There either seems to have been a resurgence in electronic music in films over the last few years or I’m getting older and noticing it more. The film is an okay movie but the score on this one is phenomenal... easily the best of a bunch this year (many of which seemed to be trying to sound just like late 1970s John Carpenter... which is no bad thing... but not quite getting there) and as accessible for someone like me as, say, the Tron Legacy score was a few years back. Definitely worth picking up. My review of the movie is here.

9.  10 Cloverfield Lane by Bear McCreary
One of my favourite modern TV composers, Bear’s score for this spin off from the original Cloverfield is fraught with tension and some interesting and melodic atmospheres... plus he uses the musical instrument known as the 'blaster beam' (which is rumoured to be able to give women spontaneous orgasms). Check out my review of the movie here.

8. Inferno by Hans Zimmer
Zimmer’s synth heavy score picks up where his masterpiece, Angels and Demons, left off. It’s not as strong a work but it does its job in the movie (which wasn’t the best of the series) and it's very listenable away from the movie. His Professor Langdon theme gets referenced here, of course, but so too does his chase music from the previous movie. Not 100% sure how the leitmotif on these films works but, who cares when it’s so much fun? The movie review to this one can be found here.

7. The Forest by Bear McCreary
Bear’s second and final entry into this list sees him providing some incredibly eerie atmospheres and a lot of his, almost trademark, drumming. Set in Japan, the score somewhat reflects this and is easily one of the most satisfying listens of the year. I reviewed the movie here.

6. Rogue One by Michael Giacchino
Giacchino’s score to one of the most frustrating Star Wars movies of all time (so far... my trust in Disney has gone right down after seeing this) is equally frustrating... both in the movie and as a stand alone listen. The composer has a lot of the musical language down but there aren’t enough big themes to make it totally sound like a John Williams Star Wars score (some would argue that it shouldn’t). Also, the choice of leaving off the opening title crawl, with the familiar main theme, was a bad call. At least it’s on the end titles but... astoundingly... on the album it isn’t. Honestly, this is absolutely a terrible thing to do... like leaving the latest James Bond song off of a James Bond score. Which is something else they’ve started doing of late. This is a quite good stand alone listen which grows on you with repeat listens but it really needs a proper, full length CD release. My review of the movie is here.

5. Hail Caesar! by Carter Burwell
Burwell’s affectionate look back at Hollywood in the Golden Age, filtered with a little of today’s sensibilities, is a beautiful and fun homage to the scores by the likes of Miklos Rosza and the kinds of songs of Comden and Green used to turn out in their heyday. Just a completely ‘smileriffic’ album which stands up away from the visuals as much as it supports them in the movies. My review of this completely underrated movie, one of the best of the Coen Brothers, is here.

4. The Nice Guys by David Buckley and John Ottman
This Shane Black movie set in the 1970s gets exactly the score it deserves. This sounds like a dozen funky TV cop shows from that era without actually pinpointing any of the influences down. It’s slick and, maybe a bit short for an album release but it certainly doesn’t outstay its welcome. This movie probably wouldn’t be sunk without the funk but, man, it has it in spades here. Crucial grooves from a movie which I reviewed here.

3. Doctor Strange by Michael Giacchino
Given the amount of superhero movies we’re getting on our screens every year, you’d think that a few more of them would have made it into my top ten. However, this is the only one which managed that trick in 2016. I was really looking forward to a Brian Tyler score for this movie, especially since he seems to be the only guy who was able to bring a semblance of musical continuity to the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Alas, he seems to have mysteriously parted company with Marvel (although I’ve heard nothing official, it’s just my observation based on a few things and I sincerely hope I’m wrong) and so we have Giacchino scoring Doctor Strange and... it’s really pretty good. The main theme and the beautiful end statements of it, especially in Go For Baroque and Master Of The Mystic End Credits would elevate it to this list most years and its’ supported by some nice stuff. My review of the movie can be found here.

2. Arrival by Jóhann Jóhannsson
Jóhann Jóhannsson is not someone whose work I’m very familiar with and so I’m inevitably going to compare it to his similarly atmospheric score for Sicario. This one really suits the subject matter with some interesting moods and a modus operandi which really fits in with the idea of language and the way it can sometimes be seen as a code... the patterns made by the music reminding the audience of this at key points and also, if you’re anything like me, frightening the  audience half to death when the sheer density of the music kicks into high gear with a more thunderous wailing than the quieter passages of musical texture around it. My review of the movie is here.

1. The VVitch by Mark Korven
At times a jarring but absolutely riveting score and quite popular with those who actually liked the movie. This score sounds very simple but it holds a power reminiscent of some of the choral work of one of my favourite composers, György Ligeti. Lay your head down in a darkened room with this and it’s pretty much guaranteed an unsettling atmosphere will develop. Simply one of the best horror scores since the 2015 score to It Follows... which is high praise indeed. My review of this film is here.

And that’s my short contribution for this year. Hope you find some time to delve into these soundtracks. If you do, let me know in the comments section below. Happy listening.

Non-Stop

Liam What I Am

Non-Stop
2014 UK/France/USA
Directed by Jaume Collet-Serra
Playing at UK cinemas now.

Well. surprisingly, this movie is not the complete disaster I thought it was going to be.

The first time I saw Liam Neeson take on the role of an action hero it was when Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace (the later 3D version of which is reviewed here) opened at cinemas in the UK. I was impressed both by the movie (yeah, I know, I’m in a minority there) and also by Neeson’s presence in that kind of role. When I went to the cinema a few years back to see him inhabit that kind of dynamic role once more, in Taken, I was once again impressed with him in that much harder edged and grittier take on the contemporary action hero.

Then it all changed for me.

I saw him take on another action role in Unknown (reviewed here), a film by the director of Non-Stop, and was extremely disappointed with it. Not specifically with Neeson, he’s always a pretty much guaranteed appropriate performance... but the film was pretty awful, it has to be said. Similarly, although I kinda enjoyed Taken 2 (reviewed here) for what it was, I felt it was a big downgrade in quality compared to the almost perfect first film... the plotting just seemed way off course to me.

Now, if I’d realised Non-Stop was directed by the same guy who turned in Unknown, I almost certainly would have avoided this one. As it was, I didn’t know that and, although the trailer for this one looked pretty run of the mill, I wanted to see if this one could possibly be as cliché ridden as the film’s pre-publicity made it out to be.

And the answer to that one is... yes.

However...

It’s also a pretty good little B-movie style action thriller and, although it does feel kinda cosy throughout the majority of the film, it didn’t spoil my appreciation of it as an entertainment. I liked, for instance, that the film made use of just one set for over 99% of it’s running time (the story is about terrorists on a plane) and I’m guessing this whole thing was a fairly low budget affair.  I also appreciated the acting performances too, it has to be said. You can’t go wrong with Liam Neeson and Juliane Moore really (although, knowing what she’s capable of, Moore’s screen time and character could have been considerably expanded in this one, as far as I’m concerned) but, more than that, it’s like the plane was filled up with really great modern character actors. I didn’t know any of their names but some of their faces looked familiar and they were all damned good in their parts.

Another great thing about this one is that the action editing was really good. And by really good, I suppose what I mean is that it displayed a high level of competence in allowing the audience to actually be able to piece together the action choreography in their heads... rather than just show a load of fast cut incidents and attempt to fake it in an almost “impressionistic” way... which has been a weakness of a fair amount of Hollywood style action movies over recent years. Yeah, I know I’ve said that stuff in reviews before but, I think it bears reiterating here because I would always appreciate knowing up front if I’m going to be able to effectively decode the images that are presented to me... no matter how short the shots are.

There are other things about this movie which are far from good, though...

It telegraphs certain things about the nature of the threat and even, in a couple of sequences, kinda points out who’s behind everything long before the actual threat even materialises in the film. The “bad guy” element is pretty much finger-pointed in the first five or ten minutes of the movie and, after that, the red herrings deliberately highlighted at key points aren’t really enough to throw you off the scent for very long, I’m afraid.

It’s also full of clichés too. Some of the character types even correlate to previous “air disaster” movies and, although they are obviously presented like this as homage, it doesn’t really do itself any favours in that regard. The character background stories are pretty 1970s TV soap opera too... so that really didn’t help. It also leads us into an almost inexcusable quality of the movie which annoyed me intensely, in that it had both the “generic villain comes back from death to cause more mayhem” factor and the “generic ally of the main protagonist comes back after death in case he needs to make cameo appearances in any sequels” factor in this film. Added to these crimes is a last minute, end of movie, blossoming romance where there really wasn’t one, and none needed, kind of ending to the story and there’s enough there to certainly have turned me off this movie.

But, as I said earlier, Non-Stop has a kind of “comfort action movie” quality to it and, as it’s well acted, well edited and has a fairly good score by composer John Ottman, then I think it’s probably going to be good enough for most fans of this kind of broad action thriller to sink their teeth into. Not a rave from me but certainly, as I said at the start of this post, not a disaster. There are a lot worse action movies being made and released into our cinemas these days, I think.