Roger Ebert

ìThe Invasionî is the fourth, and the least, of the movies made from Jack Finneyís classic science fiction novel ìThe Body Snatchers.î

Here is a great story born to be creepy, and the movie churns through it like a road company production.

If the first three movies served as parables for their times, this one keeps shooting off parable rockets that fizzle out.

How many references in the same movie can you have to the war in Iraq and not say anything about it?

Don Siegelís classic ìInvasion of the Body Snatchersî (1956) was about alien pods that arrived on Earth, sucked up the essence of human hosts and became duplicates of them ó exact copies, except for what made them human. It was widely decoded as an attack on McCarthyism. Phil Kaufmanís ìInvasion of the Body Snatchersî (1978), inexplicably described by Pauline Kael as ìthe American movie of the year,î was said to have something to do with Watergate and keeping tabs on those who are not like you. Abel Ferraraís ìBody Snatchersî (1994), by far the best of the films, might have been about the spread of AIDS.

And ìThe Invasionî? One of the alien beings argues persuasively that if everyone were like them, thereíd be no war in Iraq, no genocide in Darfur ó no conflict in general, I guess, although they donít seem to have much of a position on global warming. I donít have a clue what the movie thinks, if anything, about Iraq, which is mentioned so frequently, but it may be a veiled attack on cults that require unswerving conformity from their members. Which cults? I dunno.

In all four movies, alien spores arrive on Earth from space. In the early films they take the form of pods, which look like very large, brown snow peas. Some viewers complained after Kaufmanís movie that they couldnít believe aliens could truck those pods all over San Francisco, to which the obvious reply is: Do you expect a movie titled ìInvasion of the Body Snatchersî to be plausible?

In Oliver Hirschbiegelís new version, the spores piggy-back on a returning space shuttle that crashes and scatters debris from Dallas to Washington. Anyone who touches the debris gets the infection, which is then spread by touch and the exchange of vomit (in more ways than you might imagine). In Washington, a psychiatrist named Carol (Nicole Kidman) has a patient who complains, ìMy husband just ... isnít my husband anymore.î Versions of this line do duty in all four films. The pod people look like the people they occupy and have the same memories (ìRemember Colorado?î), but they walk like mannequins with arthritis, except when theyíre running like zombies.

Carolís estranged husband, Tucker (Jeremy Northam), is a disease control expert who becomes infected and after four years suddenly wants to start spending time with their child, Oliver (Jackson Bond). Little Oliver texts his mom that his dad is ... different. Carolís current good friend is a doctor named Ben (Daniel Craig), who is one of many to notice a new ìflu virusî that is spreading through the land.

His colleague, a researcher named Dr. Galeano (Jeffrey Wright), gets a sample of the virus, and in a performance that would be the envy of every scientist since Newton, gazes at it through a microscope and almost immediately explains what it is, how it reproduces, how it takes over when we fall asleep, and (apparently only a day or two later) how to defeat it with an antibody that can seemingly be manufactured so quickly and in such quantities that it can be sprayed from crop dusters. By this point the movie has lost all coherence, not to mention flaunting a scene where a helicopter lands atop a towering skyscraper in Washington, where federal law decrees no building can be taller than the Capitol.

This may not be entirely Hirschbiegelís fault. Warner Bros. didnít approve of his original version and brought in the Wachowskis to rewrite it and James McTeigue (ìV for Vendettaî) to direct their revisions. All three served time on the ìMatrixî movies: Just the team youíd want to add a little incomprehensible chaos.

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Nicole Kidman, Daniel Craig, Jeremy Northam, little Jackson Bond, Jeffrey Wright and other cast members do what they can with dialogue that can hardly be spoken, and a plot that we concede must be implausible but does not necessarily have to upstage the Mad magazine version. And the aliens themselves are a flop. Just like zombies, theyíre pushovers: easy to spot, slow-moving, not too bright, can be shot dead or otherwise disposed of.

OK. Now weíve had ìInvasion of the Body Snatchersî twice, ìBody Snatchersî once and ìInvasionî once. Somebody should register the title ìOf The.î
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Roger Ebert, a Pulitzer Prize-winning film critic, is a syndicated columnist based at the Chicago Sun-Times.