Reel Politique: Movie Review, The Invasion
Why was Nicole Kidman so hot to make The Invasion?
It’s a curious matter because it is a remake (the fourth) of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, so the material is not exactly fresh. Second, according to Entertainment Weekly, Kidman was already signed up to do The Brave One, and then dropped out for The Invasion. The Brave One subsequently went to Jodie Foster (which is the second time Foster has inherited a Kidman role: Foster also replaced Kidman on Panic Room). The project immediately became one of those “troubled” productions, with the original and still-credited director Oliver Hirschbiegel (Downfall, the film about the final days of Hitler) replaced by the Warchowski Brothers through their disciple James McTeigue, through the aegis of the producer Joel Silver. McTeigue and the Brothers apparently added a few more suspense scenes and chase sequences, perhaps the one in the subway, underground trains being a favorite locale of the team. In addition, Kidman was injured during some reshoots, a habit with the evidently frail Kidman, who’s apparently as illness prone as Elizabeth Taylor.
But what drew Kidman in the first place? EW says that the original screenplay was the talk of the town, and seemed to get actors excited. But there might be more to it, and seeing the film suggests that there was a personal reason for her interest in the material. After all, the plot concerns aliens taking over the world at virus speed. They seize people and drain them so they become soulless, emotionless automatons dressed in business suits. Once converted, they set about to convert those around them as fast as possible. Since Kidman was married to prominent Scientologist Tom Cruise for a while, perhaps the plot appealed to her as a dig against her former husband and his religion. Much of the center of the film concerns Kidman’s efforts to wrest her son, Oliver (Jackson Bond) from the clutches of her ex-husband (Jeremy Northam). It’s notable how often Kidman’s roles concern a woman fighting to rescue children. In an even more recent issue of EW, we learn that Kidman is a devout Catholic, which makes her flirtation with the world of Scientology even more curious.
It’s interesting to watch the former Cruises play out their psychological states on the big screen. Kidman’s Oscar-winning performance was in The Hours, a film about a prominent writer trapped in a suffocating marriage with suicide as her only escape. Her former mate Cruise had a phase where he appeared to be wrestling publicly with his private persona, and from Mission Impossible to Eyes Wide Shut to Vanilla Sky he wore masks and visibly wrestled with his identity on the screen. The absolutely personal nature of these films contradicts the pervasive notion that modern Hollywood movies are impersonal machines. Maybe they are too personal: corporate financed multi-million dollar therapy sessions for neurotic actors.
One wishes that The Invasion were a better film. It could have created more tension by pulling a Battlestar Galactica and making the “villains” a bit more interesting than the flawed humans. Wouldn’t the terror of the aliens be more intense if they actually had a well-argued case, that life without emotion was indeed better and made for a better world. An amusing subtext in the film is the running CNN news spots revealing that peace is breaking out all over the world. The Invasion could have used more of this and fewer pointless car chases. In the end, The Invasion is no more exciting nor engaging than Kidman’s last thriller, the equally confused and divided The Interpreter.
Update, Tuesday 21 August: Outsiders have finally caught on that The Invasion is a knock against Scientology. The First Post quotes a “Hollywood insider” who says that the “whole thing is clearly a calculated swipe at Scientology.” The First Post goes on to say that, “Moreover, [Kidman] plays a drug-dispensing psychiatrist, the ultimate bugbear for Scientologists as evinced by Cruise’s hugely controversial attack on Brooke Shields’ use of medication for post natal depression.”