Invasion of the Body Snatchers

Year of Release:  1978

Director:  Philip Kaufman

Screenplay:  W. D. Richter, based on the novel The Body Snatchers by Jack Finney

Starring:  Donald Sutherland, Brooke Adams, Jeff Goldblum, Veronica Cartwright, Leonard Nimoy

Running Time:  115 minutes

Genre:  Science-fiction, horror

Elizabeth Driscoll (Adams) is a laboratory scientist for the San Francisco Department of Public Health, with an interest in botany.  She becomes aware of unusual pink flowers growing out of small pods.  Shortly afterwards she notices that her boyfriend (Art Hindle) is acting strangely, and she becomes convinced that somehow he has become someone she doesn't know.  She approaches her friend and fellow employee at the Department of Health, Matthew Bennell (Sutherland).  At first Matthew doesn't believe her, but when he notices increasingly strange things happening, he realises that what has happened to Elizabeth's boyfriend is just the beginning.  Alien seed pods have landed on Earth and are somehow replacing people while they sleep: replacements that are physically identical to the original, and have the same memories and personalities, but lack emotion or basic humanity.  Matthew and Elizabeth have to save themselves and stop the invasion, but it may already be too late.

Jack Finney's 1953 science-fiction novel The Body Snatchers had previously been adapted in 1956 as Invasion of the Body Snatchers, directed by Don Siegel, one of the classics of science-fiction cinema.  It was later adapted in 1993 as Body Snatchers, directed by Abel Ferrara and starring Gabrielle Anwar, and most recently as The Invasion (2007), starring Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig.  Of course, it's a very risky proposition to remake a classic.  This film updates the setting from 1950s small town California, to 1970s San Francisco.  While Jack Finney denied that the novel was intended to be anything other than an exciting adventure story, the 1956 film is usually seen as a parable about the Communist scare of the 1950s, either a warning that there is a "Red under every bed" or a warning about the McCarthyite witch hunts of the time.  This film could be seen as a film about urban alienation and paranoia.  The mobile camera frequently following the actors like a surveillance camera.  The fact is that this has a very scary premise, your loved ones becoming someone that you don't recognise; the idea of losing your own humanity, and worse yet, they get you while you sleep, while you are at your most defenceless.  Also there is the general uneasiness of city life, living cheek by jowl with countless strangers, some of whom may not have your best interests at heart.  Seen in 2021, the film has the added resonance of the age of social distancing, with the fear of catching a fatal disease just from being around people.  The film has an interesting cast, with Donald Sutherland handling the heroics; Brooke Adams affecting as the first person to become suspicious; an early role for a nervously funny Jeff Goldblum as a struggling poet; Veronica Cartwright, who would later have to deal with even more unpleasant pods in Alien (1979), as Goldblum's frantic wife; and Leonard Nimoy as a pop-psychiatrist (this was the '70s, remember).  Nimoy's casting is interesting, as his best known role was half-alien half-human Spock in Star Trek (1966-1969) who was constantly trying to suppress his human emotions, and almost marks him as an emotionless "pod-person" right from the start, and he gives an effective and quite sinister performance.  Kevin McCarthy, who starred in the 1956 film, cameos as a man yelling warnings at passing cars, as in the previous film's famous ending.  The film is stylishly directed, opening with strangely poetic images of the gossamer pods drifting through space, and the film is shot with the afore-mentioned roving camera, and odd camera angles, right from the start everyone appears suspicious and strange, including Robert Duvall appearing in an uncredited cameo as a priest on a park swing set, gazing at the camera.  It sets itself up slowly, and has some genuinely nightmarish imagery.  The film is very much a 1970s movie, but it has aged very well, the tone is very bleak and there is a real sense of inescapable doom throughout (which makes it feel very current).  It all ends with one of the most famous screams in science-fiction history.

Broke Adams and Donald Sutherland in Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978)