Review of The Invasion (2007) by Mark M — 22 Jun 2012

I read the book about thirty years ago and I've seen the Siegel, Kaufman and Ferrara versions (the presence of Veronica Cartwright was a nice attempt to capture the fan base of the second), so any new variation on the theme is bound to feel like old news to me. This one did a pretty good job of introducing new themes into the material though, such as a comparison of what the aliens were doing to human brains with what shrinks do (hence the female therapist as a protagonist.) Plus, it's not just a movie about personal survival now, it's a mother protecting her son, which movie professionals know is much more efficient at raising audience empathy.

What I didn't like about the film was first the insanely low average shot length. In action scenes, you have about two frames per second, sometimes for several minutes at a time, which may be good at stimulating audiences' attentional systems (this is proven brain science; it works; even TV documentaries do it now), but rather tiring, not to mention the fact that there are numerous flasing images and lights that put an additional strain on your eyes and neurons.

Now here come the spoilers. I am not sure which side I would have been in this war. For the heroin, it's a no brainer: the aliens have no place in their society for her son, because of a rare disease he carries, acute disseminated encephalomyelitis, or ADEM. But this disease has an "incidence rate [of] about 8 per 1,000,000" according to Wikipedia. Now I know that we may not do evil that good may come out of it, but aren't a few thousand victims a small price to pay for peace on Earth? And doesn't she shoot quite a few people to protect him? Better still, couldn't some form of modus vivendi be found with the aliens on this issue? They were not that unreasonable.

Of course, the main problem with the invasion was the hijacking of people's minds, but the immorality of that is never really discussed. The aliens are supposed to be horrible because of the gooey substance they literally vomit on other people's faces or into their coffees, and because they're not much fun to be around because they do not emote as much as we do. Basically, it all seemed like a virus that turned humans into Vulcans, stoic and peace-loving (except the aliens are occasionally allowed to show some negative emotions to make them a little more unsympathetic.) And I'm not sure it was that wrong, at least the way it was portrayed in the film.

Another problem I have with the film is the way things happen much too fast. I remember the original novel had a much longer time frame (with the aliens' lack of drive resulting in everything on the planet decaying without repair.) Here, a sample of the alien virus is analysed overnight, and next morning, the scientists know exactly how it works and what it does, and they even have a cool CGI clip just to show you.

I was astounded to learn that the director of this film, whom I expected to be just another Hollywood hack, was Oliver Hirschbiegel, the director of "Downfall", a personal favorite of mine ("Five Minutes of Heaven" was not bad either.) I guess he must have been ovverridden quite a lot by producer Joel Silver, whose (im)personal mark is obvious throughout, or maybe he just sold his soul to Hollywood, like so many before him.