Ill-Informed Gadfly

What an incoherent mess. There’s an occasional scene that strikes the right note of humorous unease, but mostly “The Invasion” is a collection of uninspired chase sequences, punctuated by occasional pseudo-scientific gobbledygook. (There’s an awful scene that I know was part of the reshoots — because only the Wachowski brothers and their errand boy, James McTeigue, could write and shoot something so boring — in which Nicole Kidman, Daniel Craig and Jeffrey Wright stand around in a lab and “explain” the exact method of the alien organism that’s taking over people’s bodies.)

So if you’re wondering why “The Invasion” doesn’t make any sense — why, visually, it’s literally all over the map — here’s the backstory. Principal photography took place in downtown Baltimore in fall 2005. I know this because I walked past the production’s “base camp” every day on my way to work. It’s typical for movies set in Washington D.C. to do much of their shooting in my town, in part because it’s difficult to obtain the necessary permits in our nation’s capital. So the intersection of Charles and Baltimore streets gets quite a workout in “The Invasion,” as the location of Kidman’s alleged downtown-D.C. psychiatrist’s office. It’s a perfectly reasonable cheat — nobody cares, really. And I believe that if director Oliver Hirschbiegel hadn’t been fired, the movie might have retained some semblance of geographic coherence. But Warner Bros. reportedly didn’t like his cut — too moody, not enough action — and brought in the Wachowskis and McTeigue, who directed the awful “V for Vendetta,” to fix it. They did extensive reshoots in Los Angeles in early 2007. The climax — a dumbfounding car chase — is actually supposed to take place in Baltimore, and if you’re wondering when Charm City turned into a sprawling megalopolis, it didn’t.

Whether Hirschbiegel was entirely on his game is an open question. I seriously doubt his version was a masterpiece. Even early on, the details never feel right. Kidman attempts a Southern accent — once every dozen lines or so. Regional American dialects are far beyond her capabilities; she can barely do a passable American accent at all, and one wonders if Hirschbiegel, who’s German, could tell the difference.

But Hirschbiegel can’t be blamed for the way the movie lurches forward. “The Invasion” begins with a glib fictionalization of the space shuttle Columbia disaster, positing that debris from the shuttle is contaminated by an extraterrestrial virus. One of the first to be infected is Tucker Kaufman (Jeremy Northam), a doctor with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the ex-husband of Carol Bennell (Kidman). The alien flu spreads quickly, turning people into soulless, if peaceful, automatons with thousand-yard stares. There’s potential for satire here that I can only assume was better explored in two previous versions of “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” — one from Don Siegel in 1956, one from Philip Kaufman in 1978. (I have seen neither but look forward to catching up with them.) In “The Invasion,” though, the central idea — that when people’s bodies are taken over by aliens, they shed their murderous and warmongering impulses — is entirely contradicted by the action. The pod people become increasingly aggressive, like the souped-up zombies of “28 Days Later.”

That’s pretty much what “The Invasion” boils down to — a bad zombie movie with a big budget and A-list stars. It literally cuts to the chase, over and over, and the chases just get less engaging. It can’t catch its breath long enough to create the appropriate paranoid mood, and it does nothing to communicate the extent of the alien epidemic. Then, suddenly, it’s all over, and everyone’s fine. Whew! Oh, wait, I was never worried, because I was too busy rolling my eyes.