MOVIE REVIEW: 'The Invasion'


From today's Oregonian....




As a stand-alone thriller about aliens quietly taking over the planet, "The Invasion" is intermittently spooky, mostly perfunctory and occasionally very lame.

But it doesn't get off that easy, because it's also the fourth feature adaptation of "Invasion of the Body Snatchers." And when you compare this "Invasion" to its predecessors -- which include Don Siegel's 1956 Red Scare allegory and Philip Kaufman's terrifying '78 remake, which contains one of the creepiest final moments in movie history -- the whole exercise seems offensively pointless.

Original director Oliver Hirschbiegel ("Das Experiment," "Downfall") was pushed aside to make way for re-writes and -shoots by the Wachowski brothers and James McTeigue, and it's pretty obvious. Half the time, the film is a mild chamber piece making vague points about our culture of pill-therapy and war-mongering; then, suddenly, it’s a weak-sauce zombie movie full of gunplay and and helicopters and flaming car chases and greenish "Matrix" lighting. Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig are adequate leads, but no great actor will be more squandered this year than Jeffrey Wright, who does nothing but speak in vast paragraph blocks of exposition while looking haggard and bored.
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C; 93 minutes; rated R for language.

'The Invasion' (The Oregonian, Aug. 17, 2007)

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Posted: Fri - August 17, 2007 at 08:39 AM        

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