Warning from the start: Posts tagged "review" like this one will always contain major spoilers!
Welcome to the first Tasteful Nerdity review. Of course, me being me, I said I was going to focus on mostly television so here I am discussing a movie. Yet I felt compelled, almost without being able to control myself, to discuss this movie. Invasion of the Body Snatchers is a movie from the seventies. Even if you haven't seen it, some of you might at least be familiar with it because of the popular gif and image taken from one of its scenes:
Seeing this still doesn't begin to cover this movie though, which has an astonishingly high critical rating around the web. Why astonishing? Because this movie is pure nonsense from start to finish.
Where to begin? First, a little background. I love science fiction. I love slow science fiction. Also, the cast in this movie is great- none of my personal biases against certain actors are at play here (looking at you Jeremy Renner). Jeff Goldblum, Donald Sutherland, Leonard freakin' Nimoy. What's not to love?
Everything else.
To start with, this is a movie, again, from the seventies. Every American movie from the seventies, for whatever reasons, has a certain look and feel to it. To sum this feel up succinctly I paused this movie only a few minutes in to check its rating- PG. Weird for a movie from the seventies to not be rated for boobie showing but ok. Later in the movie- relief. Lots of boobies. Movies from the seventies never let you down when it comes to boobies. Sad, dull, deflated boobies shot on ugly film and surrounded by thin mustaches, bad clothes, cynicism, and melancholia.
Anyway, there is so much wrong with this movie. First and foremost none of the science parts of its science-fiction label make any sense. These aliens come to earth, drug people into sleep, and when the people are sleeping they make giant cocoons with copies of the people in them. As the clone grows from fetus-like to a fully formed humanoid the original person whom it is coping withers and dies. Yet, according to the movie, the newly formed copy retains the original's thoughts and knowledge.
Here is a breakdown of questions I had about this process throughout the movie:
1. Why do these slug looking aliens need human bodies suddenly?
2. Where did they get the original knowledge to turn into flowers to be brought into people's homes?
3. What is their goal in becoming human and taking on human knowledge, like about our social structures and basic shit like what clothes are?
4. Why do we see most pods just appear near a sleeping person, but apparently also we later see a bunch of clones shipping out pods on boats to other locales? Are they individualized or not?
5. How are these pods forming? Nothing is bringing them there next to the sleeping people apparently. And the creature inside is like a fetus- it isn't making it's own pod or moving it into place. How are these things appearing?
6. At one point our female lead is found with an almost fully formed clone near her while she is sleeping. Why isn't that clone in a pod like the others?
7. What happens to that clone, because later she does fall asleep and withers up and a clone takes her place. Is it a different clone? Is it the one from earlier? How the heck did it know how to find her?
8. Why is this movie so stupid?
It isn't just that the body snatching parts don't make any logical sense. I could accept that, to some extent. Aliens are mysterious. But the human parts also don't make sense. The characters don't speak or act like humans to begin with. Relationships are barely established. Characters aren't even established so there is no investment with them at all. Because I didn't care or know anything about these people I didn't care what happened to them.
So now for some specific fuckery. Basically, to sum this up, I do not understand any choice made in this movie by the filmmakers involved.
Starting with, add this movie to the collection of movies where any job can be a science-y job if the filmmaker wishes hard enough. Our two main protagonists, Donald Sutherland and Brooke Adams, work for the health department. Sure, that's pretty science-y! I guess! No. No no no no. What the absolute fuck? Who thought that that job would be good enough to give these characters authority over the plot? They can't do fuck all- it's a fucking alien invasion, not an E. coli outbreak. Luckily, that part is really half assed and abandoned towards the middle, almost as though someone realized that a couple mid level bureaucrats would be useless in the type of situation depicted here.
So the movie starts with these aliens coming to earth and the first thing that happens is the clone nd replace health department employee Brooke Adams' husband. Boyfriend? Cousin? Who fucking knows. Their relationship is defined by him liking sports and her existing in the same spatial plane as him.
But then, when he is snatched, that all changes. Suddenly, he is a totally different man. How? BEATS THE FUCK OUT OF ME. Unfortunately the three minutes we see of him before he is snatched leaves no discernible impression of who he is. So when he changes we just have to take her word for it.
After he is snatched she goes to bitch to her boss/friend/obvious first draft love interest, Big Donny Sutherland. He is the ACTION BASED STAR of this movie. Donald. Sutherland. Action. Saving the world. Mmhm. It works really well, as you can imagine.
So she goes to his swingin' pad and he makes her a trendy stir fry to calm her nerves. It looks like this:
Mmm, carrots, celery, and a quartered green pepper. Yum. (Why does every fuckin' stir fry recipe from this time period resemble this?)
After this part happens it gets all seventies up in there and Donald asks to take her to a psychiatrist friend of his, because wimmin be crazy. Even though her boyfriend did go all over town and do some shady meetups with weirdos that was actually a thing she witnessed because she was following him. But still- all in her head!
Now things get great. Because Nimoy is the psychologist! And a real asshole! And a clone already! Which Donald doesn't ever catch on about even though he is friends with this guy.
So Donald Sutherland takes Brooke Adams to see Nimoy. At Nimoy's latest book signing party. That is definitely a good place to get some private counseling for your friend at, DONALD SUTHERLAND YOU STUPID IDIOT.
It's very weird. Jeff Goldblum is there and then sticks for the next third or so of the movie. So does his annoying wife (played by annoying blonde lady from the original Alien movie). We don't ever really get to know how Sutherland or Nimoy know Goldblum but he is there, Goldbluming the shit out of the middle of this movie.
So a lot of stupid nonsensical stuff happens and eventually this five person team joins together: Sutherland, Brooke Adams, Nimoy, Goldblum, and Goldblum's annoying wife. Of course, Nimoy is an alien but we don't know that at first. At first we think he is just an asshole who wears deeply stupid clothing.
Those gloves. I both love and hate them.
So more stupid things happen.This is, of course, a movie where government doesn't exist, the media doesn't exist, TV, radio, newspapers. So lazy. Movies like this, be it due to aliens or monsters or disasters, can operate on one of two levels. The World War Z and Outbreak style spectacles that are all about how the world would react to a huge event or the movies that are smaller character studies, like a The Walking Dead, that tend to focus on how events would change individuals' lives.
This movie is neither. It's too localized and sparse to give a big feel to the events and yet the characters are so poorly realized that it doesn't read like anything small or intimate either. Clearly, the filmmakers didn't know what they wanted. So instead we are left with this mess.
The film ends with Sutherland trying to fuck up a gigantic pod-shipping warehouse that the clone/aliens have gained control over in a matter of days. He succeeds, kind of (hence the aforementioned "action-star" shenanigans), but it's all moot. Everyone is snatched at the end except the annoying wife who rushes up to Sutherland at the end of the move after they were separated earlier. His goofy-ass point and scream occurs at the end of the move as he outs her humanity to his fellow alien brethren.
A couple finishing thoughts. One is, this scene is hilarious:
That guy in the foreground is an extra just going to town flossing his teeth. This is a fairly long shot too. Why? Why is this ok???
Also, remember how I mentioned the clones look like fetuses? The special effects are actually good in this movie but they're not subtle. Here is a picture of . . . a thingy that is shown at one point:
It looks like a dick being birthed out of a vagina. I think it even spurts stuff after this shot, though I don't remember the context (thank god). I do know it comes fter a scene where Donald Sutherland takes a nap outside in a lawn chair and a bunch of clones in pods start forming around him and it's built up as a really tense scene even though it's, A, so stupid that he wouldn't notice them to begin with, and B, when someone alerts him to their presence he just gets up and leaves because they are pretty much just immovable fetuses. DRAMA!
So yeah, this movie is whacky and full of nonsense. It's a good reminder that just because something is old or based on prestigious source material (like the 1956 original of this) doesn't mean that it's good. This movie sucks. For all the crazy shit that is in it is is mostly just boring as hell.
It didn't understand the themes that make body snatching/cloning a powerful idea. Death, the loss of our loved ones and ourselves. The idea that the people we love the most could wake up different one day, perhaps not loving us anymore or even remembering us. The idea of losing one's sense of self, of identity. These are powerful and relatable themes that this movie abandoned in favor of genital flowers, flossing, having Hawkeye run around a lot, and sweet sweet boobies. What a waste.