watching movies one cup at a time

This film is the 4th version of the Invasion of The Body Snatchers that’s been released. Originally the first film released in the 50’s was a rather obvious “red scare” flick barely hiding it’s metaphor of alien clones as evil commies coming and brainwashing freedom-loving Americans. However now that the “red menace” is a forgotten bedtime story, what do the aliens represent this time?

There are some huge plot differences in this version. The main one being that the humans are no longer replaced by alien clones. In the original, there would be a pod-like thing that would suck all your mojo from you while you slept and then spit out a perfectly identical clone. In the new version tho the alien takeover is more like a virus that gets in your system and kind of reprograms you. But it can be cured, whereas in all the previous flicks once they got you, it was over. You were dead and Mr. Pod Clone was the new you. Which is how this movie scored a happy ending while the other ones kind of ended rather ominously. Does this help or hurt the movie? Well it’s not as scary if you can “cure” an alien invasion. It was much more frightening when they were just straight up killing people and replacing them with “pod people.”

Movies with infected people being the enemy is a common theme these days. Movies like “28 Days Later,” “I Am Legend,” and a million zombie and vampire movies all have themes of infection turning someone against their community. Maybe it’s a fear of disease or a kind of xenophobia, the “with us or against us” mentality.

This movie got ripped by the critics and went nowhere fast. But I didn’t think it was that bad. It goes a little fast in it’s alien takeover. It’s kind of like one minute the first person gets infected and then everyone is infected. And then just as fast, it’s all over and back to normal. I know they can’t squeeze too much into 2 hours, and you need time for car chases, but I’m sure it could have been done more effectively. And everyone is really quick to accept the whole alien thing. That leap of faith didn’t take much it seems. This seems to me like a perfect airplane movie. Not boring enough where you fall asleep immediately, but not interesting enough you would want to make the effort to seek it out.

Nicole Kidman was allright and so was Daniel Craig. Nothing too strenuous here for them. This is German Director Oliver Hirschbiegel’s first english movie. He last directed that last days of Hitler movie that came out a couple years ago. How he got stuck with an Invasion of the Body Snatchers remake I don’t know. I read the Wachowskis came in and punched up the script. And James Mctiegue directed a lot of reshoots. James Mctiegue was first AD on the Matrix movies and directed the phenomenal V for Vendetta. Why didn’t they just have him do it in the first place? There is potential in there for a really good movie, but ultimately it doesn’t cut it and merely passes for mediocre.