- While Don Siegel's original film was an indictment of communism, Philip Kaufman's 1978 version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers feels like a eulogy for the "weird San Francisco" of the 60s and 70s. I'm talking about a city where you can walk into the mud spa owned by Nancy and Jack Bellicec (Veronica Cartwright and Jeff Goldblum) and find somebody reading Immanuel Velikovsky or where pop psychology gurus like Dr. David Kibner (Leonard Nimoy) are recognizable celebrities. Health Department employee Matthew Bennell (Donald Sutherland) sports shaggy hair and a trenchcoat, and even successful dentist Geoffrey Howell (Art Hindle) comes across as a carefree slob. Or at least, he used to.
- In fact, it is Geoffrey's overnight transformation into a dispassionate, well-groomed man that has his girlfriend Elizabeth Driscoll (Brooke Adams) so concerned. Why would the churl who delivered a beer-fueled burp just before kissing her suddenly wake up early and take out the trash? And then there are his recent meetings with complete strangers, all of whom seem to share knowing glances about some big secret. Her friend, colleague, and not-so-secret admirer Matthew recommends a meeting with Dr. Kibner, who admits that "It's like there's some kind of a hallucinatory flu going around." Although Elizabeth wouldn't know about this, the audience might reasonably suspect a connection to the film's stunning opening sequence in which cosmic foam rained down on Earth just before those strange pink flowers started popping up everywhere.
- So far, this may sound like a paint-by-numbers retread of the original film's themes, but Kaufman's film is to be credited with finding wholly new ways to be discomforting. Sometimes it's minor characters doing strange things, like that priest on the swingset (an uncredited Robert Duvall!) or the hysterical pedestrian who got run over (original Bennell Kevin McCarthy!). Sometimes it's the canted angles, strange shadows, or cinematographer Michael Chapman's oddly-toned color palette. Certainly the music (by Denny Zeitlin) and "pod people scream" sound effect are disconcerting, as are the uncanny plant movements and disgusting duplication effects. But the award for the most unsettling film element surely belongs to that horrifying dog whose banjo theme was performed by Jerry Garcia. Not going to lie - I've been keeping a close watch on the houseplants and the family pet all morning.
- Just as the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers was a natural extension of the alien invasion movies of the 1950s, this interpretation spawns directly from the paranoid thrillers of the 1970s. In keeping with that genre, its two male protagonists are largely repellent outsiders, although the two women protagonists are much more sympathetic. (Goldblum's character quips that he has no friends, and I tend to believe him.) The two decades that passed between the two pictures also apparently eroded away whatever hope may have been present in the original film, with this one leaning memorably into total pessimism by the end. Those of us who harbor a natural suspicion of bagpipe renditions of "Amazing Grace" may feel some glimmer of vindication, I suppose. In any case, watch the skies all you want, but you'd be hard-pressed to spot a better remake than this one.
