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.