Get Paranoid With the New INVASION
Nicole Kidman's paranoia gets an aerobic workout in INVASION.
In this summer of sequels, threquels and remakes, one title is actually kind of intriguing: INVASION - yet another imaging of INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS.
Though the new film has not been seen by critics (uh oh), the trailer is effectively unnerving, with nervous thoroughbred Nicole Kidman freaking out while her neighbors and friends become strangely emotionless. (Thank you, Jeremy Northam, for your suave Eurovillainy. Don't trust that guy for a minute, Nicole.)
In the Sunday New York Times, Dennis Lim looks back a the various iterations of this marvelously paranoid tale, from the original Jack Finney novel (mid 1950s, naturally) to the Cold War paranoia Don Siegel film (1956), to the psychotherapy-cult weirdness of the 1978 of Philip Kaufman's 1978 update. Abel Ferrara's BODY SNATCHERS (1993), set on a military base in the American South, made the heroine into a moody teenager, was unsettling in a different way: she was trapped and powerless even before the pod people arrived.
Interesting, isn't it, that Kidman already played a Cassandra in a remake of a paranoid thriller? The ill starred STEPFORD WIVES of a couple of years ago. To her credit, she was damn funny as a stressed out TV executive in that movie's first 15 minutes. But STEPFORD, unlike INVASION, did not stand up to re-examination.