Review of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) by Garrett C — 25 Mar 2017

In classic horror film fashion, before it was a convention, everybody thinks the protagonist is crazy; surrounding characters do not understand or believe Matthew Bennell (Donald Sutherland). There's this thing that we know from the onset of the movie that nobody else understands. It's like the crazy kids who declare Freddy Krueger is alive in their dreams. Leonard Nimoy is the best catalyst for this because if anybody should understand the bazaar and unnatural it is Spock. Jeff Goldblum seems to be playing a character that will be mirrored 15 years later in Jurassic Park, believing in the insanity, that something is wrong. Everyone from Sutherland to Nimoy is close to understanding what's going on, but they are just missing the mark. By not having Nimoy on our side, the audience is bound to feel unsafe, a terrific exercise in terror, suspending any sense of security the audience would have. Being made to look crazy is the scariest feeling that I can possibly imagine. I appreciate the relation of maddened husbands to infectious disease, or alien hypnotism.

I see an allegory to the feeling imperialism creates - nationalism, ethnic cleansing -- you slowly become the silent minority. We get a sense of how it feels to be on the run, society's target; a Holocaust Jew. To be paralyzed by society's stronghold this way. Like the Borg, all that's left is to assimilate.

What better plot device than a food inspector as the hero in a story about combating invading microbes?! He goes from pulling rat shit out of a French kitchen soup to swinging off rafters, tearing down a warehouse, playing undercover alien, etc. That's a protagonist!

The one hour mark of any movie is a particularly special point, whether it's the shark appearing in Jaws, Silva's reveal in Skyfall... In this film it's gathering acceptance from Leonard Nimoy, which instantly turns on us as we realize he is with the other possessed males. Is he an alien? Has he never not been Mirror Universe Spock all along? We learn this as he walks out of building 227, which is Sutherland's home.

There's such an air of mystery here, the flowers, their purpose, everything involved with this alien invasion. How is it happening, and why? Why is it happening this way and what are the men's role? There's a terrific level of conspiratorial guessing, it's exciting. The birth of Body Snatcher's must've inspired Peter Jackson's Uruk Hai growing from tree roots in Lord of the Rings, like butterflies emerging from cocoons - are their screeches used as sound bites for Black Riders?

Insanity conquers the Earth, and a helpless female is all that hopelessly remains. Not even our hero can survive. We know she'll be the only sane person left in a world gone mad. This film raises questions of infections, particularly the psychological, in which the values of one culture are diminished in favor of its opposite, and how it trickles down and invades the individual.