The Invasion is about an intelligent alien bacteria that modifies the essential nature of humanity without changing its physical nature. The Invasion attempts to teach us something about our essential nature but instead teaches us about our nature to be suckered into a dull movie.
A shuttle crash brings with it an alien parasite that enters the human population. Dr. Carol Benell (Nicole Kidman) is thrown in the middle of the outbreak when her ex-husband, a doctor for the Center for Disease Control, Tucker Kaufman (Jeremy Northam) visits their son, Oliver (Jackson Bond.) While Oliver is visiting his father, he and Carol get separated and Carol has to try to find him in the middle of the outbreak. Her and her colleague, Ben Driscoll, (Daniel Craig) set out to find him. The only way to move through the ever transforming sea of the infected unnoticed is to pretend that you have no emotions.
The first twenty minutes of the movie is director Oliver Hirschbiegel’s attempt at showing how emotional, individual, and human we all are in our everyday lives. On her walk to work, Carol is confronted by examples of emotions running wild in the street. Women are crying, loud conversations come from men shouting into their cell phones and there are obvious acts of love between mother and child. There are so many acts of emotion that you wonder if they let the mental patients out of the hospital. It gets nauseatingly obvious that Hirschbiegel is trying to make a point, he might as well have used giant red pen.
As The Invasion progresses, you can identify those poor saps who have contracted alienococcus by the deadpan looks on their faces. Their inability to exhibit basic human emotion is obviously supposed to be frightening. Not a single actor in the movie, except Jeremy Northam, can muster the stone faced, emotional façade to make the rigid roboticism feel realistic or petrifying. The majority of The Invasion has at least one person attempting stoicism and their acting disabilities left the movie infirmed, debilitated and crying out for cinematic medical attention! Nicole Kidman left me looking for a paramedic.
Kidman’s ability to be imperturbable could be measured in centimeters. She nearly mastered the stiff body movements but couldn’t ever quite relax enough in her face to pass as an emotional vacuum. Kidman couldn’t quite get the hot-blooded, impassioned, tender, or touching perfected either. Her performance was a well rounded mess. She is supposed to have complex feelings for Ben but there is no affect entanglement or fruition.
Ben, played by Daniel Craig, didn’t impress either. The script and the direction were obviously attempting to build an Olympic sized pool, I had my bathing suit and towel, and Craig can’t muster the emotional depth of a tide pool. There is even a shamefully awkward kissing scene that made me avert my eyes and gnash my teeth.
Another thing that nearly made me crack my teeth was the CSI knock off, super close-up blood scenes. Want to see how autoalienitis affects a normal human body and see crappy graphics and animations? Director Oliver Hirschbiegel will provide you with enough atrocious reenactments and demonstrations that you’ll never need to watch another alien autopsy. Thank goodness the movie isn’t all blood work.
The camera work in The Invasion is the most haunting and resonating individual component of the movie. Generally speaking, the transformed characters are shot at a lower anger with slightly darker lighting. It may be standard horror movie faire but cinematographer Rainer Klausmann made classic chiller cinematography feel fresh and freshness was something desperately needed in The Invasion.
The point of the movie is obvious but not poignant. Even though there is a beginning, a middle and an end, it feels like the plot is missing a meaty component that you can sink your teeth into or to leave a lasting taste in your mouth. None of the characters feel finished, the relationships don’t feel genuine and the plot feels hollow.
While there are times that The Invasion is fun, with action that can captivate for a couple minutes at a time, that’s pretty much all it has to offer. The Invasion won’t make any ten best or worst lists. It will earn the obscurity this mediocre execution deserves.