Invasion of the Body Snatchers

I’ve seen two other versions of this story: the 90’s remake with Gabrielle Anwar, and the remake with Nicole Kidman. Neither of these were particularly outstanding in any way. But I’d watch either of those any day over this broken, sloppy mess. Every problem with this movie comes from a fundamental misunderstanding of how a story is told. Sometimes, the movie keeps telling us something but fails to back it up with what make a movie a movie: visuals. The first act is especially guilty of this, when the movie keeps talking about how many people seem to think their loved ones are acting weird, and how society is changing. But we never SEE it. The scope of the problem is conveyed only through words. Maybe this would be okay if it was a rural podunk in the middle of Montana, but this takes place in San Francisco. This movie never uses that to its advantage. There’s leaving things up to the imagination, and then there’s creating gaps and refusing to fill them. Secondly, the movie often has characters just leap to conclusions based on minimal or no evidence, because the plot needs things to happen to keep moving. Main character Elizabeth starts to suspect her boyfriend is “not himself on the inside” because he … gets up early, takes out the trash, and doesn’t reciprocate an embrace. Oh, and he has a meeting that forces him to give up basketball tickets. Girl, he could’ve slept bad and had a schedule change, but no, it’s clearly mental illness. STFU. The scene where the protagonists go from “it’s a mystery flower” to “it came from outer space and uses fragrances and pollen to replicate human beings” is baffling in its lack of logic or how human beings think. And last are how the rules of the replication changes whenever and wherever the plot suits it. Does the pod need to be nearby, or can it be in another room, or even inside when the person is outside? Are the original humans kept in pods or do they disintegrate? If the aliens can flawlessly replicate life on planets and eliminate hate and war and emotion, why would they ever need to go from planet to planet? And why do they screw up with the human-faced dog? Acting, it’s fine. Everybody does their job. But the script is a heap of broken garbage. Whoever wrote it has no idea how to tell a story. The ending is iconic, and the performances try to elevate the material, but no amount of lipstick makes a pig anything more than a pig.