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231 comments in total

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137 out of 200 people found the following comment useful :-
Invasion of the Script Snatchers, 19 August 2007

Author: Brent Trafton from Long Beach, CA

*** This comment may contain spoilers ***

"The Invasion" had a lot going for it. It had two big stars, an acclaimed director, a big time producer, and a time tested premise. The only thing missing was a script.

"The Invasion" does not follow the same story as the earlier movies. They took the premise and made a new story. The new story has only a threadbare plot, no character development, and some of the most banal dialog I have heard in recent years. At 93 minutes, there are long passages that go nowhere and do nothing for the story.

Whoever gave the green light to this production without having a decent script first should be fired.

Despite that, there are some parts that are watchable. It is just frustrating that they could not have come up with a better story and better characters.

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66 out of 88 people found the following comment useful :-
Not bad... just not award worthy., 21 August 2007

Author: itzik9000 from Canada

*** This comment may contain spoilers ***

I didn't know much about Invasion before I walked into this movie. I heard the bad reviews from critics but hell, who listens to them? While watching this movie, I wasn't aware that The Invasion was re-filmed and rewritten. Apparently they rewrote it to add the twist in the end, as well as they added more action sequences with faster and better-angled camera work.

So the movie starts off right away with Carol Bennell (Nicole Kidman) scattering around the medicine cabinet in a Pharmacy whispering "stay awake, don't fall asleep" to herself. The neat fast-paced camera work kept you right into the movie from the beginning, but sadly the amazing beginning just doesn't match up to the pathetic ending. It seemed like they got tired of writing the movie so they decided to end it off with a simply and quick ending.

Some organism from a different planet crashed down to Earth and took over the citizens of the world. When the organism comes in contact with a human, they will become a different alien-ish like being obsessed with capturing people and affecting the world with their plague. When each person was affected, they would turn into these emotionless, mindless and painless zombies while they sleep. In search of her son, Carol Bennell gets affected and must stay awake so she would be able to save her boy. With help from Ben Driscoll (Daniel Craig) and his team of doctors, they go on the search for a cure, to save humanity and especially, save Carol.

I find that this movie gave off the message it was trying to, but in the process it failed at almost everything else. I was expecting, before walking into this movie that it would be filled with suspense with my heart jumping ever so often... but I wasn't scared or thrilled once. The suspense scenes had great music playing, had the great camera angles, but was just missing the spice to make it really work. And in regards to the end of the movie... I can promise you the writers got tired of having to rewrite a story and just through in a quick, painless ending. Course the quick painless ending resulted in annoyance for the audience.

While I walked out of the theater, I was thinking about this movie and how I would interpret it. One thing came to my head, and it was that the new directors did what they were supposed to - make me think and remember this movie once I leave the theater. This was NOT a forgettable movie, rather quite memorable. Sure there was a bad ending, but my eyes were attached to the screen throughout the whole film. I didn't look at my watch once, and for me that gives this movie a big bonus.

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89 out of 136 people found the following comment useful :-
Taunt and Smart, Kidman shines here., 31 August 2007

Author: wji222 from United States

First of all, this is not a scary movie. Instead, there is an atmosphere of tenseness, especially when Kidman and Craig's characters must pretend to have already changed in order to survive. Kidman easily carries this film, and she makes you believe the plot line that another actress would have easily made ludicrous. I have read some critical reviews questioning the casting of Kidman in this role, mostly due to the fact that her icy demeanor is seemingly miscast in a role that calls for emotion. However, I believe that it is this very demeanor that allows her to be believable in this film. She plays an extremely smart psychologist who catches on to the situation fast. She is an analyzer, and it is her lack of deep emotion that allows for her to think quickly and critically, without it, she would have easily succumbed to the body snatchers and there would have been no movie. There is indeed a liberal undercurrent through this movie. It questions our role in Iraq but more importantly, it questions our actions as a species, our emotions, our anger, our selfishness, and their effects on our society. To create a world in which everyone is equal, rational, no war, no disease, no famine, no inequality is what the body snatchers are offering...and for this movie goer, there was at least one point in the film in which I found myself asking whether that would be so bad. Sure, the ending was a little too quick and tidy, but overall, this was a great movie.

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79 out of 121 people found the following comment useful :-
Not Bad..Nicole lookin good!, 24 August 2007

Author: rdambroso from United States

We went to see this last night. After all of the horrific reviews, I was expecting a real P.O.S. I was pleasantly surprised. While not to say it was an AWESOME movie or anything. It was good Sci Fi fun. I get irritated when a lot of movie buffs are looking for every film to be a Gone with the Wind or something. This was just a fun, smooth, entertaining production. I've never been a real fan of Nicole kidman, but I must say, she was quite fetching in this movie. If you are looking for the 50's version of War of the Worlds..The forbidden planet..John Carpenter's the THING...etc..it doesn't qualify. If you are looking for a fun Sci Fi Thriller to watch, it does the job.

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90 out of 149 people found the following comment useful :-
Blame it on the Hollywood suits, 13 December 2007

Author: emgasulla

I honestly don't think the movie is worth an 8, not in its released form. But since the cuts and additions from the suits are so painfully obvious, I'm willing to give a higher rating to the movie that could have been... and for now, only the original director Oliver something has seen.

So the original movie (which is still discernible somehow) was supposed to be a dark, slow take on isolation, pill overuse and boring modern life. With a twist: a mom so desperate to protect her child, she would silently watch other people being killed as long as she can find her kid. That's actually moving and seldom seen in a macho-dominated Hollywood. I won't say that ice cold Kidman is the right choice to depict a desperate mom, but given that her role is to often look emotionless (so she can pass as another "pod people") she doesn't do too badly.

Now, the suits didn't like that and called those soft-brained Wachowski bros to make it -supposedly- more mainstream. And what they did was to add car chases, crashes, helicopters, fires and senseless violence in general. Inserted into the original movie at close intervals to keep people amused (or so they thought). Now, there are a few good directors who can pull out a combination of slow burn and crazy action. But a patchwork movie made of two different directors' bits, guys with widely opposed instincts and goals, no wonder the result is a flop.

If anything is to be learned from this, it's how little do Hollywood executives know about what makes a good movie. Granted, a non-stop mishmash of violence and fifth-drink bar philosophy like The Matrix can earn the big bucks, but you can't expect Matrix-like bits to improve what was intended to be a slow paced, moody film. Which was probably condemned to be a box office failure, but also could have been pretty good.

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46 out of 66 people found the following comment useful :-
At turns mind-numbingly obvious and clichéd, 17 August 2007

Author: tsunetomo1659 from United States

*** This comment may contain spoilers ***

I actually went into this movie with pretty high expectations, considering that the Wachowski brothers were involved and it seemed like an interesting premise from the trailers. Well, as it turned out, somehow all of that potential was utterly wasted. From beginning to end this movie is boring, predictable, and terribly clichéd. I kept hoping until the end that at some point it would get better, but bit for bit everything in this movie is the epitome of all that is trite and stale in sci-fi movies and little to nothing of what is interesting and original.

Every crummy sci-fi/horror movie starts out with little hints of whatever fantastic thing is supposed to happen later, and so did The Invasion. Except, in The Invasion this whole section keeps pointing out things to the audience that were mind-numbingly obvious. "My husband is not my husband anymore..." Oh really? Well surely she's just some nut-case and it has nothing to do with the storyline that's been explained on TV commercials and in movie trailers for the past several months! I honestly don't understand why filmmakers like these frequently feel the need to spend half of the movie beating the audience over the head with information that they could (and probably already did) find in a one sentence synopsis of the film.

Per the typical, trite sci-fi/horror movie formula there's also a scene where the main character brings a same of something weird to a scientist and he examines it and conveniently explains everything that the audience needs to know about the substance/disease/alien race in a straightforward, uninteresting way. There are so many scenes like this where the characters are supposed to be revealing something new and interesting but it just comes out as if the writers think that the audience is a a bunch of slobbering morons who can't take a simple hint.

Here's one detail that particularly struck me for its idiocy: about a third of the way through the movie, there's a scene where the Russian guy (who cares what his name is) basically explains (through a convenient monologue) the thesis of the movie which goes something like, "a world without newspapers constantly talking about violence and hatred is a world without humanity." Later on, there are some segments showing on a TV that say that fighting has ended in Iraq and then Daniel Craig's character gives another speech that is very obviously supposed to be a counterpoint to the first one that goes something like, "in our world, there is no need to hurt one another." At the end, after the aliens are nearly destroyed Daniel Craig talks about how 87 people just died in Iraq. As if ALL this information wasn't enough to make you draw some sort of a connection, they just have to drill it directly into your skull by replaying the Russian guy's quote again. I could mention plenty more things like this, but I'm starting to get annoyed.

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112 out of 204 people found the following comment useful :-
Travesty, 19 August 2007

Author: herrnoel from United States

The 70s remake of this film succeeded because it was a chilling psychological thriller with little to no horror film elements and a biting ending that lingered with you for days.

This film starts out with the premise and setup, but quickly deviates into a different film -- a rehashing of 28 days later and outbreak with illogical, formulaic action sequences that are literally lifted straight from any zombie film. As usual with sub-par screenplays, the plot requires illogical and implausible events to move forward and provide thrills. In the end, it couldn't make up its mind whether it was an intellectually compelling, psychological thriller or yet another zombie action film? The ending was ... eh I don't even want to explain it.

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33 out of 47 people found the following comment useful :-
Do not Sleep!, 2 March 2008

Author: Claudio Carvalho from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

While returning to Earth, the space-bus explodes and the fragments bring an alien virus that recodes the human DNA. In Washington, the psychiatrist Carol Bennell (Nicole Kidman) observes the modification of the behavior of one of her clients first, then in her former husband and finally in the population in general. Together with her friend Dr. Ben Driscoll (Daniel Craig) and the researcher Dr. Stephen Galeano (Jeffrey Wright), they discover that the extraterrestrial epidemic affects human beings while sleeping and that her son Ollie, who had smallpox with Acute Disseminated Encephalomyelitis (ADEM) when he was a baby, is immune to the disease and may save mankind from the outbreak.

Don Siegel's "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" is one of the best sci-fi ever, therefore most of the remakes are good because the story of earth being invaded through replicas of the human beings is excellent. "The Invasion" is maybe the third remake of the classic that I have watched and I liked it in spite of having an optimistic and corny conclusion. I do not dare to compare the classic movie of Don Siegel with this remake, but I have found it very reasonable and entertaining. My vote is seven.

Title (Brazil): "Invasores" ("Invaders")

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35 out of 56 people found the following comment useful :-
I Kept an Open Mind, 24 August 2007

Author: Kashmirgrey from United States

You hafta' go into every movie with an open mind if you're going to give it a fair assessment, right? Well, I did exactly that with "The Invasion". Despite all the heavy and (quite) ugly criticism this movie received, it had a fair cast and it isn't too often that Nicole Kidman is in something completely awful. Let it be known, as well, that I am a big fan of both the original and the 1978 versions of "Invasion of the Body Snatchers". It is reasonable to speculate that fans of either of those two films will be disappointed with this latest stab at the "body snatcher" storyline.

However, I asked myself, is the point to compare this film against its predecessors or should I evaluate this film on its own merits alone? I decided the latter was the right course and with this in mind, I watched "The Invasion".

The film opens with a very frantic Carol Bennell (played by Nicole Kidman) rummaging through the shelves of a pharmacy. She is searching for sleep suppressants. We are then taken back in a recent past where a space shuttle crash lands into the countryside. The shuttle's wreckage has brought back something with it. From the moment that Bennell's ex-husband (played Jeremy Northam) pricks his fingers on a foreign organism, life becomes a serious drag for the (evidently, terrible) human species. Bennell, who is a psychiatrist, doesn't get it at first when one of her patients (played by Veronica Cartwright who also starred in the 1978 "Invasion of the Body Snatchers) irately claims her husband isn't her husband. But it doesn't take long before Bennell figured out that all is not right in Everytown, USA.

This film was not awful. This was, by no means, the worst of the "snatchers" make-overs. 1993's "Body Snatchers" is my nominee for that award. There were some moments in this film that worked well such as a brief, but tense scene when Bennell and her son (played by Jackson Bond) are unsure whether the other is... them. I also liked the "attempt" at a different approach to the body snatching "method". All in all, for me what kept me watching was Kidman. No, not just because she's a super-hottie (although it never hurts.) She adeptly became Bennell and breathed life into her character. I actually thought this was one of her better performances.

This could have been an excellent film, but as is all too often the case these days, character development was not a priority. Beyond Kidman as Bennell, character development was non-existent. How people are being snatched, also, is never adequately, not even remotely, explained. Wherein the other snatcher films, while the victim sleeps their body rotted away and their alien replacement is created within a giant pea-pod, in "The Invasion" the process is never identified. This makes for a very weak ending. Truly, with today's SFX, this could have been an extraordinary "revelation". What was most disappointing was the attempt at social and political commentary. Good grief! I cannot think of a more articulate adjective then just plain...lame.

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103 out of 194 people found the following comment useful :-
If your a fan of any other iteration you will hate this., 17 August 2007
Author: manakin33 from United States

Hollywood destroyed everything good about this film.

There was a resounding creepiness that looms over the body snatcher remakes and the original. This film misses that on every mark. No pods... No siren screams... And the ending, well, is a slap in the face to the concept.

If your not a fan or have never seen any other versions you might think it is OK. But thats it, just OK. They screwed up one of the scariest concepts ever thought up. Permormences were OK. It had one or two bright points but overall it was crap.

Take the cgi out of war of the worlds and you have invasion... thats not a good thing.

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