Oct 101978
 
three reels

People begin to act differently, losing interest in their normal activities and becoming emotionless.  Public health chemist Elizabeth Driscoll (Brooke Adams) notices the change in her boyfriend, and tells coworker Matthew Bennell (Donald Sutherland).  Bennell assumes she is having emotional problems and brings her to pop psychologist David Kibner (Leonard Nimoy), who explains that her fears are due to the lack of commitment in her relationships.  But when spa owners Jack and Nancy Bellicec (Jeff Goldblum, Veronica Cartwright) find a half formed body, they all realize that humans are being replaced.

By the late ’70s, America was a very different place than it had been when the classic 1956 Invasion of the Body Snatchers was made.  Gone was the fear of reds hiding under the bed as well as goose stepping McCarthyism.  But paranoia is omnipresent and new fears ruled.  It was a time of growing impersonalization, with the cozy neighborhood eclipsed by the urban jungle.  It was also the time when people looked back and realized that the idealism of the ’60s was gone.  Flower children had become Wall Street brokers.  In other words, it was the perfect time for a retelling of the ultimate tale of isolation.

This version isn’t a remake.  It has an entirely new set of characters, in a new place and time, undergoing horrors similar to, but not the same as those in the original film.  If it wasn’t for the gap of twenty years, this would be a sequel.  It even has a cameo by Kevin McCarthy (the star of the original), yelling a warning in the streets.

Like the first, it conjurers up a world of paranoia which should have you glancing uneasily at the person sitting next to you (personally, I wouldn’t trust him!).  Shadows abound, and even the day is gray and unpleasant.  I can’t recall if the sun ever shines.  Even when the leads are doing nothing more than strolling down the street, everything looks off.  People are constantly staring or in the wrong place (an unaccredited Robert Duvall, as a priest on a child’s swing, is particularly unnerving).  Then there is Nimoy, who is disturbing, particularly when he’s smiling and tossing out useless self-help slogans.  There are no moments when you can relax.  It’s a tense world and a tense film.

But this time, I was never completely brought into that world.  Director Philip Kaufman makes the mistake of supplying no entrance.  In the ’56 version, we see the world through the eyes of a nice, normal, rational guy, and are taken with him into paranoia.  But here, we are first presented with the already-paranoid Elizabeth, who is a believer in evil possession from moment one.  Additionally, Adams plays her too sedately, as if she has already lost her soul.  It’s harder to care about the population of the world being replaced by emotionless clones if everyone is already half way there.  Then the point of view switches over to Sutherland’s Matthew.  Now I enjoy Sutherland, but he is never warm and cuddly.  Is there any difference between a Sutherland pod-person and a Sutherland non-pod-person?  He’s pretty creepy no matter who he is playing.  Goldblum amps up his nerd stereotype to make Jack such an annoying person that I want him to be gobbled by the nearest alien plant, and while Cartwright’s Nancy is better, I can’t say that I was deeply concerned with her welfare.  When the situation is so bleak and strange, some kind of happy normalcy is needed to trick you into joining the party, and to show you what is being destroyed.  Here, it looks like the world was lost before the movie started, and we’re just along to watch it gasp.

A third, slightly less successful version, entitled Body Snatchers, was made in the early ’90s, and Sutherland starred in the similarly themed The Puppet Masters in ’94.

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