reviewed by Charity Bishop

        

I am not a huge fan of cheesy sci-fi thrillers. The word "alien" is usually a turn off unless it involves Doctor Who, but The Invasion looked good enough from the previews that I decided to rent it, and was tremendously happy that I did. It's the kind of film where you are not required to bring your thinking cap, that builds suspense from beginning to end, and delivers more than its fair share of thrills. In a word, it's fabulous.

Mid-afternoon, in an abandoned and torn-apart grocery store in midtown Baltimore. A frantic woman rifles through what remains of the pills stashed on the pharmacy shelves and takes a handful of them, along with half a bottle of Mountain Dew. Several weeks earlier, right around Halloween, a space shuttle came careening out of the air and left a twenty mile wide strip of debris from lower Texas to Washington. Overnight, the place was crawling with federal agents, including Tucker Kaufman (Jeremy Northam), who was unfortunate enough to cut his hand on  a bit of twisted metal. When he arrives home that evening, for the first time in his life, his dog growls at him. Local mutts have been going nuts ever since the shuttle crash. His ex-wife Carol (Nicole Kidman) is oblivious to the rash of strange canine and human behavior until her son Oliver (Jackson Bond) is with a group of trick or treaters that are set on by a neighbor's hound.

Cleaning the blood off the boy, she discovers a strange, iridescent compound in amidst the treats, and takes it to be analyzed at the local lab. Her best friend Ben (Daniel Craig) tells her it is nothing to be worried about... but people all over the city are starting to behave strangely. Some of them are in hysterics. Others are so calm that they seem sinister. Worst of all, she discovers too late that her ex-husband is not what he seems, and it becomes a frantic race to save her son and herself from the extra-terrestrial invasion sweeping the globe. It sounds fairly simple and it is, but fortunately has good enough acting that the audience doesn't much mind its faults. Kidman and Northam are two of my favorite thespians and seeing them together on screen was wonderful. I've only ever seen Northam depict a villain one other time, but he has a natural way about it, managing to be immensely scary with very little effort and almost no facial expressions.

Part of that is owed to the director, who has woven together a very impacting and frightening film that uses flashbacks and visual reminders without becoming too predictable or confusing. I know the ending was changed significantly some time after the film wrapped, but I don't know what the original plan was, nor do I have any complaints that it ended on a reasonably happy note. I will make one minor complaint, however, and that is that the film was discreetly used to present an objection to the current war in Iraq, through the use of reports of great numbers of American troops dying on the news, as well as a ridiculous withdrawal to the "cheers of the Iraqi people." It not only dates the production, but irritated me because it was attempting to get across a political message in a sci-fi film. That being said, there is not much else that audiences will find objectionable, unless you are easily grossed out by projectile spit. The alien virus is spread orally, which means that at least six times disgusting looking mucus shoots out of characters' mouths and lands on the faces of their victims. In one jarring scene, Carol is forced to the floor and held down during this transfer of fluids.

While in regeneration, humans appear covered in a transparent but oily substance that sometimes kills them; one man convulses violently and then mucus explodes out of his mouth as he dies. Police are shown restraining screaming victims. Carol is forced to defend herself from alien-possessed humans, shooting six people (one in the leg) and smacking another over the head with a hammer (it's unknown if it kills them or not). One woman runs out in front of a car and is graphically hit, her body slamming into the pavement. A possessed child is shoved into a piece of furniture, striking his head and knocking him unconscious. The climax involves a high speed car chase in which bodies fly off the hood of the fleeing vehicle, crashing through glass windows and rolling into the street. There is no sexual content (surprisingly, her relationship with Ben is not physically intimate) but women are shown in their undergarments on two occasions. There is one harsh abuse of deity ("Jesus"), one use of God's name laced with a profanity, and one obscenity. The film is very intense and may frighten small children, but for lovers of suspense like me, was the perfect way to spend an evening.