Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1681 in Movie
• Released on: 2008-08-04
• Running time: 100 minutes

Customer Reviews

Loved It !
I Loved this one! I usually do not like Sci-Fi for aliens just isn't my favorite thing to watch. But this one, well it was really good. Nichole's character was everything you would expect it to be. Classy, Beautiful, and as a mom she had the right feelings, protectiveness. An Ex well I believed it, and the boyfriend they had chemistry. The movie started with creepiness that is made for a good thriller but just not sure what to expect and left you filling in some of the blanks which gets an A for letting us use our imagination. The plot is a takeover used in form of a virus which fits in the 21st century. At least when people started to change it didn't make you have to believe aliens as little green creatures (even though there was green soup :)). To live you have to act like one of them, which to me wouldn't be that easy. But all in all this movie was to me a solid thrill ride with a touch of horror, and worth seeing again.

The Invasion
Good movie. Outside of the Other's I don't usually like Nicole Kidman's movie's. I did like this one alot. Worth the time.

Nearly Deplotted, We Are Gatthered Here Today...
This version of Jack Finney's book Invasion of the Body Snatchers had some promise, but ultimately missed the opportunity. Apparently the studio didn't like the cut director Oliver Hirschbiegel delivered. My suspicion is that the original film, which was completed in 2006, was probably more coherent. The Wachowski brothers were hired for massive rewriting and James McTeigue directed the new scenes. The result is a film that takes an unexpected turn for the worse.

What's new in this rendition is that the victims of the alien virus aren't replaced by duplicates. Instead, the virus just acts within their own bodies, changing them so that they act as one organism-- we're talking a slightly nicer version of the borg from Star Trek. The idea of a more benevolent invader would have been a fresh interesting take and was where this movie was headed before the hack job. It would have been more insidiously delightful to explore the cost benefit analysis of succumbing to the invasion. No more wars, cruelty, and poverty on one side, while the stripping of a lot of what makes us human on the other-- also the collective vs. the individual. This probably would have come closer to Don Siegel's communist cold war scare overtones in the original movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

Instead the movie moves to more action sequences of fighting against a overtly hostile threat. This is where the original idea gets abandoned and the movie loses its way.

All of the actors put in decent performances here including an admirable job by Nicole Kidman in the lead role, Daniel Craig as her love interest (an excellent new James Bond by the way), a very good cameo from Veronica Cartwright (in the 1978 remake Body Snatchers), Jeremy Northam as the somewhat creepy ex-husband, and Jeffrey Wright as the scientist.

I think the studio should take the blame for dooming a film that had some potential. It's still an enjoyable watch and worth a rental, especially for alien invasion enthusiasts. I don't think I've ever seen a more equally distributed range of opinion by reviewers (from one to five stars). Where it all tallies out is about where I'd put it... 3 stars.

P.S. Although lesser known than Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Jack Finney wrote a couple of great books on time travel (From Time to Time and Time and Again) as well as several short stories. They go well beyond being just science fiction and are highly recommended.