Movie review: Please, not another 'Invasion'

'The Invasion" is a science fiction nightmare, the spectacle of actors who can do first-rate work trapped in a soul-destroying mechanism created by madmen.

In the umpteenth and least successful remake of "Invasion of the Body Snatchers," Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig star as Washington, D.C., doctors fighting the spread of an epidemic from outer space. The contagion drains humans of emotion and compels them to wear drab monochrome clothes, stand at attention, stop using contractions or vocal inflections in everyday speech, and hold their faces stationary like Botox victims.

The clumsiness of this film beggars description. In the first five minutes, NASA honcho Jeremy Northam arrives at the site of a space shuttle crash whose wreckage is being cordoned off. A scientist in a hazmat suit warns him of a virulent space bug coating the debris.

On his way out of the site, a little girl offers him a piece of twisted metal that landed on her roof. Northam pricks his finger on the fragment like Sleeping Beauty, falls into a fitful sleep and grows a mucus husk in bed. The next morning he's staring out his kitchen window with unblinking eyes and the eerie calm of an electroshock patient. Improbability, awkward tempo, clumsy exposition, coincidence, bad makeup and unpersuasive acting -- check, check, check, check, check and check.

It would be good to say the film improves from there, but it would be inaccurate. Northam phones ex-wife Kidman, a psychiatrist, and asks for visitation with his son, played by first-timer Jackson Bond of White Bear Lake, a blond moppet who was born to have his hair tousled by doting grownups. Somehow Northam has intuited that the boy belongs to a select group who might hold the cure, which would undo his work of convening briefings for medical researchers where infected waiters clandestinely spit into the coffee.

Kidman sends her child to stay with Northam, belatedly realizes that a stoicism plague is sweeping the world, and spends the rest of the film trying to get the boy back from his menacing dad, who, although unfeeling and ruthless, sort of forgets to kill the boy.

Craig tags along to look into microscopes while frowning and to have plot points explained to him. Learning that the parasites attack when the human host is in a dream state, Kidman frets, "I'm so afraid I'm going to fall asleep," and begins chugging Mountain Dew to keep her eyes open. Nodding viewers in the auditorium might do the same.

The usual exercise in blame-apportioning is impossible here. You might as well try to sift through a garbage dump. German director Oliver Hirschbiegel, who made a gripping film of Adolf Hitler's last days in "Downfall," originated the project, but reportedly loused it up so badly that the Wachowski brothers were drafted for an extensive rewrite, with new scenes filmed by their "V for Vendetta" director, James McTeigue.

We can say for certain that in the last half-hour, the dour tale of personality disintegration turns into a movie about car crashes and Molotov cocktails. The collision of tones is at least good for a few laughs. When an impassive young boy gives Kidman a hard time, she grabs him in a Homer Simpson chokehold and throws him headfirst across the room. I don't think it was intended to be funny, but the screening audience interpreted it that way, just as they burst out laughing at a badly staged auto accident that was supposed to be a shocker. In a fiasco like this, you take your amusement where you can find it.

Colin Covert • 612-673-7186

Colin Covert • ccovert@startribune.com