“For better or worse … we’re human again …”

What’s everyone’s beef with this? Invasion of the Body Snatchers is just one of those stories that always works, and this new version, despite all the problems in its making (and yes, they do show – but I do wonder if we’d notice or care so much if certain people didn’t spend as much, if not more, time dwelling on what’s behind-the-scenes as they do on what ends up on the screen), is no exception.

Basically, it had me at “another Body Snatchers remake”, Nicole Kidman, Daniel Craig, Oliver Hirschbiegel, a really nice John Ottman score and all manner of supporting cast members. I wanted to see this movie. If you think there’s nothing here to love, then you know enough already about your own tastes to not bother watching. But if you think you might quite like it, I don’t think you’ll be disappointed in the slightest.

I think the highest praise I can give it is that I almost accidentally gave it the acid test by watching it today, having only slept a couple of hours this morning … my head was practically dropping off my shoulders during the Olsen twins movies, but by the end of this? I was bolt upright.

The only thing I’d personally complain about is the quite astonishingly conventional car chase and cure-all ending. I’m pretty sure they must’ve shot some kind of ending with a twist (first thing that came to mind for me was the rather obvious thing of the people on the helicopter having fooled her or something) – literally any kind of twist, no matter how corny, would’ve been more satisfying than that simple line I began the review with (don’t get me wrong, it’s a great line, I love it – but like that’s literally the ending of the movie and it’s not enough).

In the end, like all the other versions of the story, it leaves you thinking. It’s one of those movies that makes a frighteningly convincing case about something that we’re meant as “humans” to turn our noses up at. It actually makes you pause and go, “hang on … why not just let them take us?” Well, it did me at least. Perhaps I’ve said too much, lol. I know I wasn’t alone on the whole “wait a sec, Vader is talking perfect sense!” thing in Revenge of the Sith lol … Anyway … Equilibrium kinda did all the emotional deprivation thing a little better, but sometimes there’s room for many deliveries of a similar message and this is one such instance. For me it all comes together in the scene between Kidman and her son, a scene I was really longing to see, when they are both feigning a lack of emotion for fear that the other is “one of them”. Which I’ve found is exactly what far too many of us do for way too much of our time here recently.