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The Invasion
dir. Oliver Hirschbiegel (credited) and James McTeigue (uncredited)
It starts in the middle, with a haggard-looking Nicole Kidman in a trashed drugstore with bloodstained walls, flickering fluorescents, sticky puddles of Mountain Dew, and other horrors. She’s looting the prescription shelves, stuffing herself with stimulants, muttering about staying awake.
Then it goes back to the beginning: A spaceship burns up over earth, scattering debris infected with a space virus from D.C. to Dallas. The humans start getting a weird flu that erases all affect and makes them want to kill dogs. It is, of course, the space virus, which takes over a person’s DNA during the first sleep after infection, turning that person into a kind of zombie-alien. Freshly minted zombaliens want to mint other zombaliens. Enter the barf.
Stranger Personals
The zombaliens infect people by projectile vomiting, first surreptitiously into their beverages at restaurants, and then, as they get bolder, straight into their faces. The zombaliens want to turn the world into a big, affect-free family: no war, no class division, no feelings, no individuation.
All horror movies are morality plays: Lust, arrogance, and myopia are the cardinal sins and gruesome death their penance. The Invasion’s moral message concerns radical utopian liberalism. (The Invasion is based on a Red Scare horror film, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, from 1956.) The zombalien rhetoric about a hegemony of peace and equality might sound tempting to a certain sort of person, but their uniform world is cruelly boring and cold.
(Alternately, The Invasion might be a parable about manners. Gone are the days of politely and secretly vomiting into people’s cups. Now it’s barfing directly into each other’s faces, without a by-your-leave. Shameful.)
So Ms. Kidman fights for freedom, motherhood, and a barf-free social life by staying awake and looking for her son (abducted by her zombified ex-husband, who is not played by Tom Cruise), stuffing her cheeks with prescription amphetamines as she goes. Daniel Craig, the love interest and a doctor, is trying to find her and her son and take them to a quarantine clinic.
There are few gross-out special effects, even though the film was redirected and rewritten by James McTeigue and Wachowski Brothers, of the Matrix monolith. Warner Brothers pulled them aboard, apparently, because the original screenplay (by Dave Kajganich) and direction (by Oliver Hirschbiegel) lacked a certain something.
Whatever that something was, McTeigue and Wachowski haven’t brought it either. Craig and Kidman are nearly as affect-free as the zombalien invaders, and aside from a few tense, claustrophobic scenes, the direction and camerawork are unmoving.
Ditto for the projectile-vomiting zombaliens—like the radical utopian ideals they parody, they’re more interesting in the abstract.
brendan@thestranger.com
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