Foster on Film

Teenager Marti Malone (Gabrielle Anwar), her stepmother Carol (Meg Tilly), and stepbrother Andy (Reilly Murphy) travel with her EPA inspector father (Terry Kinney) while he tours military bases.  There’s something wrong at the latest one.  The soldiers are too emotionless, and Andy begins to fear his preschool class where all the children draw the same picture.

The third version of Jack Finney’s The Body Snatchers, Body Snatchers (no “The”), like its predecessors, is a well made piece of paranoia.  Director Abel Ferrara dumps the useless jump-scares so prevalent in horror for some real terror, built up slowly and then revealed to be as bad as expected.  His pacing is leisurely, pulling the viewer into the situation bit by bit.  If this had come out in 1955, it would have been a classic.

But it didn’t come out in 1955.  The story’s been told, and told again, and then told with larger variation under different names.  Having been done in b&w as a small town personal story, and then in color as an urban, world view story, I’m left wondering what made anyone think a new version was needed.  I suppose switching to a teen’s perspective—giving a younger audience an entrance into the story—could be a reason, but not a very good one; I saw the original ’56 version as a pre-teen, and I understood it without the need for a youthful guide.  Part of the story’s tension comes from the unknown.  Something strange is happening but it is uncertain what.  But there is no uncertainty in a copy of a copy.  The characters might not know what is happening, but I do, and that takes away a lot of the impact.  Luckily, Ferrara and the extensive writing team know this, and don’t waste time building a mystery.  We know the pods are there and what they do, so he tosses them in our faces quickly.

The ’56 version was a metaphor for the communist threat: it comes slowly, while we’re not looking (while we’re sleeping), corrupts those around us, and takes over, leaving an emotionless government where individualism and emotion are stifled.  Some claim the film takes the opposite political side, and is an attack on Joseph McCarthy, though that interpretation takes more dancing to make it work.  Either way, the film shone light on the social upheaval of the time, and the cry “they get you when you sleep” is the deeper message.  The 1978 re-make also looked at a time of cultural uncertainty, when the eccentricity and hope of the 1960s were fading away.  So, what is the message of this new version? What is the social changes that could lead to the loss of individualism?  Thematically, the new version is a confused mish-mash.  Placed on a military base, is it saying that soldiers have already lost their humanity?  If so, it doesn’t do anything with that point.  Body Snatchers is less interested in saying anything coherent than in just making quick, simplistic analogies: Soldiers are like pod-people; being a developing teenage girl is like being completely alone in a world of aliens; having a stepmother is like having your mother replaced by something foreign.  As nothing is said any deeper with any of these, it’s best to ignore them, and take the film as a rather effective, but empty, fright fest.

The performances of Gabrielle Anwar, Meg Tilly, and Reilly Murphy are impressive, each making a believable character.  Anwar has a tough job with a girl who is on the razor’s edge of annoying, but brings out her intensity and enough fear and hurt for her to gain my sympathy.  But it is Tilly that raises the bar.  The most important scene in the film is the stepmother’s, as Tilly somehow makes her slightly inhuman.  Stopping her ex-family from leaving, she asks them, “Where you gonna go, where you gonna run, where you gonna hide?  Nowhere… ’cause there’s no one like you left.”  Now that’s creepy.

Unfortunately, the males don’t do so well.  Terry Kinney is forgettable and Forest Whitaker pops in to shake and stammer as an over-written doctor.  But they are both superior to robotic Billy Wirth, who plays Tim, the hero, with a mild smirk.  Late in the film, he must pretend to be an emotionless pod-person, and there is no change from his work in the rest of the film.

The effects are good (except for a fall from a helicopter where the body shimmers) and I can’t think of a horror film that makes better use of nudity.  Nothing is gratuitous.  It is only the pod versions of people that show up naked, nonchalantly, as they don’t care, but yet are willing to use their flesh if it is an advantage.  The human response to lust and fear are not that different, and Ferrara plays with that, using one to augment the other.

It all leads to a poorly conceived climax. In an embarrassing scene, a pod-person tests Tim’s emotions by saying “I fucked your girlfriend” and as Tim manages not to attack him, he accepts Tim as one of them. With the fate of the world in your hands, how neurotic would you have to be to go into a rage at a sixth-grade taunt?  And shouldn’t the aliens have a password or something to identify each other?  I won’t give away the ending except to say it was disappointing.

Body Snatchers was an unnecessary project that is nonetheless enjoyable to watch.