Being a rather big fan of Oliver Hirschbiegel’s work, I was disappointed to hear about his troubles on Warner Bros. The Invasion - accidents on set, massive re-shoots and re-cutting by the Wachowski brothers and James McTeigue. There’s a germ (spore?) of a good film alive inside The Invasion, which I suspect is representative of the film Hirschbiegel set out to make, but with so many other creative hands stirring the pot the film ends up muddled and largely unimpressive.
The Invasion‘s warping of the classic Invasion of the Body Snatchers trope adds new wrinkles in the form of advances in medical science and a pill-popping citizenry doped up on anti-depressants (in one of the film’s more slyly conceived notions, shrink-cum-heroine Nicole Kidman freely doles out meds that turn her patients into figures not unlike the eerily complacent pod people). There are also several well-staged sequences set during the early stages of the pod takeover including a traffic accident in a tunnel, a botched intervention during an old man’s transformation to his pod state, and Kidman’s escape from a contaminated subway train.
The film misses its mark way too often, however. The editing, which backtracks and jumps forward to little effect, often confuses. The actual invasion is poorly realized and what interesting tangents it does present - for instance, the US government attempting to cover up the pandemic as a super-flu of some sort - are all but ignored.
A few of the restructured segments are painfully obvious, including an awkwardly-staged dinner conversation between Kidman and a Russian dignitary that smacks of the Wachowskis’ increasingly banal “philosophical” musings. Several great actors (Daniel Craig and Jeffrey Wright, in addition to Kidman) are wasted in under-developed, cipherous roles.
A disappointment on many levels, especially considering Hirschbiegel’s obvious talent for realizing on-screen paranoia, The Invasion is best forgotten.
