The Invasion (review)

I once heard Harlan Ellison opine that no one should ever remake an sf film because there are too many good stories out there just waiting for translation to visual media for the first time. As an sf fan I wholeheartedly agree with this sentiment, especially since the tendency to obsessively remake a few choice films belies the imaginative depth and stylistic breadth of the genre as a whole. At the same time, as a literary critic who brings her training to bear on sf studies, I cannot help but think that, just as there is potentially great merit in re-reading books to yield new meaning, so, too, might there be great merit in remaking sf films to do the same.

Nowhere are the promises and perils of the sf film remake more apparent than in Oliver Hirschbiegel's The Invasion (2007), the third film version of Don Siegel's classic Invasion of the Body Snatchers (US 1956), itself based on Jack Finney's 1955 novel The Body Snatchers (the two other remakes are Philip Kaufman's Invasion of the Body Snatchers (US 1978) and Abel Ferrara's Body Snatchers (US 1993)). Like its predecessors, The Invasion follows the adventures of a scientific expert who discovers that humans are being replaced by emotionless alien clones. However, while previous iterations of Finney's story revolved around the loss of individualism in the face of threats including suburbanisation, communism, urban isolation and the militarisation of civilian life, Invasion screenwriter Dave Kajganich decided to shift focus to explore how power replicates and preserves itself at any cost. Accordingly, he set The Invasion in that symbolic and literal locus of American power, Washington, DC (Cheong). Kajganich also chose to underscore his new theme by revising Finney's story in two other key ways: shifting the mode of invasion from the literal replication of people in vegetable pods to the internal transformation of humans by way of viral infection and making the protagonist a female doctor and parent rather than a single male scientist (or, in the case of Ferrara's film, the single teenaged daughter of a male scientist).

Viewers nostalgic for Finney's original story and the first three movie versions of it might well lament the lack of iconic pods in The Invasion. However, Kajganich and Hirschbiegel's decision to represent the alien invasion as a viral infection actually makes good sense from the perspective of both sf and film studies. As Darko Suvin has famously proposed, sf is defined not so much by the literal presence of science or technology in any given story as it is by the presence of a novum (be it new sciences or technologies, new kinds of agents or new locales) that provokes both estrangement and cognition — that is, a sense of wonder about why this world is different and a sense of certainty that the difference can be explained in terms of current knowledge about the physical (and to a lesser extent, social) world (4-7). As bio- and nano-technologies that promise to rewrite the body from within become increasingly central to the public imagination, it makes a good deal of sense to cast the threat of alien invasion in similar terms. It also makes good sense in terms of recent film history. In her groundbreaking work on this subject, Kirsten Ostherr proposes that both public health and Hollywood directors typically convey the terror of contagion by splicing together scenes of humans who either carry or are dreadfully changed by disease with 'non-profilmic, animated images of contagion whose "authenticity" is affirmed by the equally artificial technique of voiceover' (59). The frequent use of similar techniques in The Invasion suggests that it might be fruitful to consider this particular film not so much in relation to previous versions of Finney's story but instead in relation to viral outbreak films characterised by similar visual techniques, including Outbreak (Petersen US 1995), Virus (Bruno US/UK/ Germany/Japan/France 1999) and...