‘The Invasion’ Is the Worst Possible Version of ‘Pluribus’

Welcome to Memory Holed, a new column from MovieWeb deputy editor and film critic Britt Hayes (that’s me). Each week, I’ll revisit the movies (and occasionally TV shows) that were culturally relevant for a brief time before collapsing into obscurity. Whether they were notable for having high-profile casts, generating awards-season buzz, using popular IP, stirring controversy, igniting discourse, or any combination of the above, these movies have been deliberately erased from the pop-culture consciousness. In other words: they’ve been memory-holed.

This week, instead of covering a Thanksgiving movie, of which there are too few, or a movie released at Thanksgiving time, few of which interested me, I seized on the release of Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery to revisit one of Daniel Craig’s most memory-holed movies. No, not Cowboys and Aliens – that would have been too easy, and as we’ve already established, this column is nothing if not an instrument of (self) torture. Which is why I chose The Invasion. The what? Exactly.

Warner Bros.

Carol, a tenacious woman with a business-casual blonde bob, is distressed when people suddenly become emotionless versions of themselves. They look the same and sound the same, but they no longer express their feelings, especially the negative ones. More troubling, they’re all referring to themselves as “we,” as if they’re part of some kind of hive mind, and they keep insisting that Carol will feel much better once she joins them. Carol’s emotions become a liability that she has to control in order to safely navigate her new, unsettling surroundings and unravel the mystery behind this massive societal shift.

…Isn’t that just the plot of Pluribus? Yes. It’s also the plot of The Invasion, a movie that came out 18 years ago yet somehow feels like a very bad rip-off of a series that didn’t exist yet. If anything, I’m certain The Invasion proves that non-linear time travel is possible.

Released in 2007, The Invasion was written by David Kajganich (Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria) as an update on The Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel, a German filmmaker known for Downfall, the Oscar-nominated drama about the final days of Adolf Hitler. If you remember The Invasion at all, it’s probably either because Kidman was famously injured in an on-set car accident, resulting in multiple broken ribs, or because of the highly publicized reshoots, which occurred 13 months after production wrapped. Warner Bros. hired The Matrix duo Lana and Lilly Wachowski to rewrite the script and help with additional filming before enlisting V for Vendetta’s James McTeigue to direct the reshoots, for which he received zero credit (probably for the best).

Warner Bros.

The Invasion actually starts on a promising note, with a strung-out Nicole Kidman frantically chugging a 2-liter of Mountain Dew and searching for Adderall like she’s prepping for a marathon session of Halo, or whatever people were playing in 2007. Unfortunately, this moment is rudely interrupted by a jarring smash-cut (one of many) to the inciting incident, when a CG-space shuttle crashes through the title card and into Earth’s atmosphere. As news footage helpfully explains, there were no survivors, and chunks of the destroyed ship – which landed all over the country – are covered in a weird fungus that people are instructed not to touch, so of course that’s the first thing they do.

Carol (Kidman) is a psychiatrist and among the first to notice that something is wrong when her ex-husband, a CDC employee (Jeremy Northam), starts acting like more of an asshole than usual, and one of her patients (the great Veronica Cartwright) expresses fears about her husband’s sudden change in demeanor. Carol’s ex kidnaps their son, but thankfully, her boyfriend Ben (Daniel Craig) is a hot doctor with highlights in his hair, and his colleague is Dr. Exposition (Jeffrey Wright, naturally), so they’re on the case. And it’s not long before they figure out what you did in the first three minutes of this movie: the weird fungus is extraterrestrial, contagious, and it is turning everyone into pod-people.

There’s potentially an interesting version of The Invasion, at least based on the fragments of dialogue that gesture toward themes of power and whether our capacity for violence is what makes us human. Discussing the project back in 2007, Kajganich said, “You just have to look around our world today to see that power inspires nothing more than the desire to retain it and to eliminate anything that threatens it.” That sounds interesting, and it also sounds nothing like the finished film, which – like the infected population therein – doesn’t appear to have anything on its mind.

Warner Bros.

But is it at least nice to look at? No. The Invasion is shot like a Saw sequel, with the color palette of an old bruise. As aforementioned, the editing is jarring. Shots of Kidman giving her signature side-eye are disrupted by hard cuts to graphics of viral specimens, to signify the invisible threat. Speaking of editing, now feels like the perfect time to mention that The Invasion was produced by Steven Soderbergh, one of our best living filmmakers and a guy known for killer edits. I find it impossible to believe that Soderbergh never once attempted nor was asked to help with the editing of this movie, which he could have probably fixed in two days.

The Invasion isn’t completely awful – there’s a scene where Jeremy Northam spits a giant loogie onto Kidman’s face to infect her with the pod-people fungus, as one does, and it’s pretty funny. What if a virus was spread through expelled mucus?! Could you imagine?!

As for Daniel Craig, the entire impetus for watching this movie, he’s fine. He’s mostly just there to be Kidman’s puppy-dog sidekick with side-swept surfer bangs, and he’s probably quite pleased that almost no one remembers the terrible sci-fi movie that came out 9 months after his first Bond film, Casino Royale.

Release Date

August 17, 2007

Runtime

99 Minutes

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