THE
INVASION (2007)
The Invasion (2007)
Actors: Nicole Kidman, Daniel Craig, Jeremy Northam, Jackson Bond,
Jeffrey Wright
Directors: James McTeigue, Oliver Hirschbiegel
Format: Closed-captioned, Color, DVD-Video, Subtitled, Widescreen,
NTSC
Language: English
Subtitles: English, French, Spanish
Region: Region 1 (U.S. and Canada only)
Aspect Ratio: 1.78:1
Number of discs: 1
Studio: Warner Home Video
DVD Release Date: January 29, 2008
Run Time: 99 minutes
Movie:
 
Disc:
 All
Hollywood movies are art by committee, but
The Invasion turned out to be art by test audience.
When test audiences
complained that German director Oliver Hirschbiegel's retelling of
Invasion of the Body Snatchers was too
boring it was decided to bring in the Wachowski Bros (Matrix
trilogy) and V for Vendetta director
James McTeigue to do a minor rewrite and graft on some newly filmed action
scenes.
The end result is somewhat uneven as action movie scenes nestle
uncomfortably next to scenes of brooding paranoia about spores from outer
space slowly taking over humanity. Ironically as we become less human,
world peace starts breaking out all over the place
- a
philosophical point the movie hammers at too much for its own good.
Still, it is always fun to
see the lovely Nicole Kidman outrun endless hordes of possessed humans on
some very high heels, and we can never really tire of watching that . . .
THE DISCS: The DVD
release is a bit of missed opportunity like the movie itself. What would
have been ideal is a disc version with the theatrical version on the one
disc and Hirschbiegel's pre-test audience version on the other. Maybe that'd
be the topic for an altogether different DVD release one day, who knows?
Instead we just have a single disc edition containing the theatrical
release.
There are no audio
commentaries and the film's troubled production isn't so much as even hinted
at in any of the brief making of featurettes. The 20 minute-long
documentary titled We've Been Snatched Before: Invasion in Media History
isn't exactly the retrospective on the previous film versions as its title
might lead one to believe (no one so much as even mentions the 1990s Abel
Ferrara Body Snatchers flick). Instead of footage
from previous film versions we get a lot of heads talking about various
health scares such as Sars and Avian Flu and how the media blows them out of
proportion. The talks are actually quite interesting and not your typical
"yes, but it can be true!" style Hollywood agitprop. This documentary is
worth checking out.
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