Oy, I haven't updated this one in a long while, either!
The Invasion (2007 - Oliver Hirschbiegel)
I was so anticipating
The Invasion, but when it was finally released...eh. Very pedestrian, for my taste. I like Kidman a lot as an actress, and I thought the post-9/11 climate was fertile for another modernization of the Finney concept. But in spite of some very good actors, including Jeffrey Wright, it has absolutely nothing new to add.
The production was troubled, as they say in the biz. The German director Oliver Hirschbiegel (
Downfall, Das Experiment) was hired and shot the film, but then the studio decided they didn't like it, hired the Warshowskis (
The Matrix) to rewrite portions of it, and ultimately hired their longtime assistant, James McTeigue, to do a bunch of uncredited reshoots. That's why the film took so long to be released, and probably why hardly anybody likes it. I have no idea how substantially different Hirschbiegel's cut was from the finished project, but as is...not so good. I suppose if you had never seen any of the true classics of the genre, one might find
The Invasion OK, but as a sucker for these things, even I was bored.
Slither (2006 – James Gunn)
A tongue-in-cheek gorefest,
Slither is maybe the best of the alien body snatching formula movies to be released in the new century. It is very derivative, including notes hit by
Night of the Creeps (1986), which has some cult rep, though I have never grooved to it and skipped it going through my major chronology. Derivative or not, it is campy, bloody fun. Written and directed by James Gunn (
Super, Guardians of the Galaxy) with a great cast featuring Nathan Fillion, Michael Rooker, Elizabeth Banks, Gregg Henry, and Gunn’s then-wife Jenna Fischer. A meteorite lands outside of a small town, and a slug-like parasite emerges, infecting first Michael Rooker’s sleazy car dealer, and then creating a nest of slugs incubating in a woman he was having an affair with. One by one townspeople are taken over, with Rooker quickly morphing into a larger and more grotesque monster, with Fillion and his deputies trying to save the town. Way far from perfect, but fun.
The Thing (2011 - Matthijs van Heijningen Jr.)
Rather unnecessarily, a prequel was made to John Carpenter’s now-classic
The Thing (1982). As fans of that film know, the transforming alien infiltrates the Antarctic post in the form of a dog being chased by a helicopter, with men trying desperately to shoot it dead. This prequel shows what takes place up until that event, with Mary Elizabeth Winstead’s palentologisgt called in by the Norwegian researchers who have discovered the alien craft buried in the ice.
The trap of this prequel is that much of it is entirely predictable and tensionless, since we know exactly where the narrative is leading, and yet when they try to add their own flavors here and there, it feels
too unlike the Carpenter original and thus false. They did wisely attempt, at least, to use some practical effects instead of completely relying on CGI, to keep it more in line with the 1982 film, but ultimately this was simply a losing proposition. I suppose it had
slightly more chance of working than a full-on remake, but then again, as much as that would be sacrilege and unnecessary, at least they could have, in theory, gone their own way a bit more?
“Unnecessary” is all one needs to know, really.
The Host (2013 – Anderw Niccol)
A recent one I haven’t bothered to see yet is
The Host, adapted from a novel by the
Twilight saga’s Stephenie Meyer. The slight twist here is that the narrative takes place years
after an alien race has taken over the human population. But a few pockets of real humans remain, and with a teenage girl for a protagonist, played by Saoirse Ronan (
Atonement, The Lovely Bones, The Grand Budapest Hotel), they set out to somehow reverse the tide and return Earth to earthlings. The cast also includes Frances Fisher, Diane Kruger, Bokeem Woodbine, William Hurt, and young would-be hunks Max Irons and Jake Abel. I don’t think Meyer went quite as heavy on the teen romance angle here as she did in
Twilight, but it is there. I am in less than no rush to see it, but am enough of a sucker for the genre that, yeah, I’ll probably check it out on cable, someday. I believe it was supposed to set up some potential sequels, but considering its rating on Rotten Tomatoes currently sits at 8% and it was a box office dud, I’d say
Golden Compass is more likely to get a follow up than this turkey.
Despite no real successes of late, either artistically or business wise, this particular subgenre will surely keep regenerating itself forever and ever, like an insidious, interplanetary seed pod. The basic premise of people not seeming to be “themselves” is just too deeply ingrained in our DNA, I expect, and eventually filmmakers will find the proper inspiration in which to filter this sci-fi/horror model again.
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