BODY SNATCHERS (1993)

This, the third film-adaptation of Jack Finney's 1955 novel, "The Body Snatchers", does quite a lot of things right, but ultimately falls a bit short. 

"They get you when you sleep." - Andy 

This is going to get spoilery, so if you haven't watched this flick and don't like spoilers, then you may want to skip this review. 

So, as I mentioned before, this is remake month, and as was the case with DRACULA (though not to the same extent), there are more than two film adaptations of Jack Finney's 1954 science fiction novel "The Body Snatchers" to choose from. So, before I hit this version, I watched both of the previous versions, titled INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS, from 1956 and 1978, respectively.  

Those adaptations are widely considered to be absolute classics by movie-buffs and critics alike, so, when compared to its predecessors, BODY SNATCHERS has some very big shoes to fill.

We have another new setting, this time out of an Army-base in Alabama, versus a small town in So-Cal in McCarthy-era America, or a large city in the dingy, cynical 1970's. From a logical standpoint, the choice of a military-base seems, to me, like a smart move on the part of the invading organisms. After all, if you can take over all the military bases first, the rest of the conquest is likely to go a lot more smoothly. 

But there's a second reason why its a good choice, and that revolves around conformity, the raison d'être for the human-duplicating alien pod-creatures. There's a lot of conformity and rigidity to be found on a military base, at least to a certain degree, and that might make the initial infiltration harder to spot and effectively combat, until its too late.

That said, the thematic crux of this film isn't really the military, but rather the disintegration of the family.  The people that you are supposed to love and trust the most, suddenly infected, overcome, and ultimately robbed of their living heart. Replaced instead with what amounts to a soulless hive of beings that look like people, but aren't. Intelligent, certainly, but with a single, unified purpose, and possessing about as much individuality as a colony of ants: military conformity taken to its ultimate extreme.  

Here, the main characters are, essentially, children. The teen-aged Marti Malone (played by Gabrielle Anwar, probably best known for the TV series BURN NOTICE), and her young half-brother, Andy. Marti already nurses some inner-turmoil, partly in the form of her step-mother, Carol (played brilliantly by Meg Tilly), whom she already considers a "replacement" for her own, deceased mother, and later comments that she never expected her father, Steve (Terry Kinney), to get remarried. 

Kids, huh? They have that tendency to overlook the fact that their parents are people. But I digress.

Marti already feels disconnected from her family as-is. She's unhappy about this temporary move to the Army-base, necessitated by her father's job for the EPA, and feeling out-of-touch with him in general. She punctuates this disconnection by inserting her earbuds and listening to her portable CD player, and further disassociating from the world around her as a means of avoiding her frustrations. Young or old alike, how many of us can identify with the appeal of escape when faced with frustration and anxiety? Just about all of us, I wager. 

Is there anything more to this feeling of alienation from her father than his remarriage combined with typical teenage ennui? The film offers up some hints, but ultimately, we have to make up our own minds. 

There's a scene almost midway through the film where Marti returns from a night out with her new friends, the leather-jacketed, independently-minded Jenn (Christine Elise), and helicopter pilot Tim (Billy Wirth). Steve had implored that she return by midnight, and she shows up a half-hour late and smelling of the single-beer she drank, an incident that an angry Steve blows somewhat out of proportion, which may hint at previous trust-stretching misbehavior. Or, he could simply be an over-protective father reacting negatively to the growing sense of independence his 17-year old daughter is displaying. He further botches things up the next morning at breakfast by allowing himself to be baited into an argument with Marti, where he makes a comment that skirts really close to "bridge too far" territory. 

Entropy already: the Malone family was somewhat primed for dissolution before they ever arrived at the base, but by this point in the film, there's more going on under their roof than Marti's outsized teen irritation, because the enemy is already there among them. As young Andy states when offered the chance to go to day-care or remain at home with his mother, "My mommy's dead."

Like I said before, this movie does get quite a few things right, retaining and remixing elements from the original novel and the 1978 film as well, particularly the unforgettable inhuman alarm-cry of the human-duplicates. 

Two scenes are particularly chilling. The first one takes place when young Andy is in daycare, where the children have been spending time doing some finger-painting, an event that is normal enough at first-blush. However, when the teacher asks the class to hold their paintings aloft, Andy realizes that his is the only one that is unique, as every other child has painted the same abstraction, each one identical in terms of color, composition, and pattern. The disapproving glance of his teacher cements the unease, showing that Andy is indeed the only real human-being in the room. Suddenly afraid, Andy soon runs away, where Tim finds him a little while later walking determinedly across the grounds of the base. When asked why he ran away, an already justifiably paranoid Andy tells him that the teacher tried to make him go to sleep.

The second chilling moment comes later when Marti's duplication is inadvertently foiled by a lack of foresight on the part of Carol's duplicate, and she goes on to save Steve from his own duplication. Grabbing Andy, the three of them are confronted downstairs by pod-Carol, who goes on to verbally impress upon Steve the futility of his resistance. Tilly's partially-disconnected delivery is pitch-perfect here, managing to place not-Carol within a very uncanny valley which is at-once seductive, yet also repellent in equal measure.

Faced with the realization that Carol is dead, and her replacement is trying to convince him that surrender is the best option, Steve does the only thing a father can do: he grabs his children and flees. And as he does, pod-Carol stalks to the stoop and fills the door-frame, treating us with this version's first-example of that inhuman scream of alarm. All-in-all, combined with the lighting and camera-angles, the result is easily the most memorable scene in the film, and it earns the movie an additional star all on its own. 

However, Tilly's excellent performance serves to underscore what, to me, is the film's biggest failing, especially when compared to its predecessors. With the exception of a criminally-underused Forest Whitaker (as the base's chief medic, Major Collins), and the late R. Lee Ermey (as General Platt), who share a very disturbing scene of their own in the 3rd act, Tilly just outshines almost everyone else. Much of the acting just fails to be engaging, and it prevents this film from earning an additional star. 

Gabrielle Anwar is fine as Marti, but "fine" becomes an issue when we're talking about the film's lead.  Arguably, her best scene comes late in the film when her almost-complete pod-duplicate attempts to seduce Tim into allowing the process to complete itself. The young Anwar is fashion-model beautiful, with skin like porcelain, but there's so little variety to her expressions at this point in her career that her performance lacks depth of character. On one hand it works to a degree, at least in terms of showing her teenage disconnection, but there are scenes where I feel she should show more emotional range, and she simply misses the mark.

Worse (worst, even), is Billy Wirth's Tim, who comes across as a block of well-sanded wood, and when he manages to fool a group of pod-duplicates late in the 3rd act by acting like an emotionless pod-person, its an all-too-easy sell. 

And then there's Steve. While Kinney's performance is largely fine, especially once he realizes what's going on, his character just isn't the most likable of people. By the time he wakes up, a lot of the damage is already done, and I wasn't particularly invested in his survival, which is unfortunate. 

Even the ear-splitting scream of the pod-people has lost some of its formidable punch. As it was in 1978, that alarm-cry is the shrill condemnation of the misfit, the strange, the different, the non-conformist, the the other, who stands-out among the teeming masses of the so-called normals. It's an expression of bigotry-and intolerance incarnate: every racist slur, every self-righteous condemnation of the religious establishment against those who worship a different God (or no God at all), and every cruel, childhood taunt on the playground, all summed up in a way that says in no uncertain terms "You do not belong!"

But perhaps because it was so very unforgettable in 1978, it became an expected part of the entire mythos, and as a result, it has lost some of its impact. Or, perhaps I'm just jaded, or even too enamored of the 1978 version to give this one a fair shake. Still, with so much of the acting falling flat, I don't think that's the problem here. 

As events build towards the climax, Marti and Tim flee in an Army chopper, and in the process, both Steve and little Andy are lost to the otherworldly menace, leaving the pair as the sole-survivors from the base. From there, the film offers us an ending which could mark a possible victory over the alien pods. The pair uses the fully-armed helicopter's supply of ground-support rockets to destroy the convoy of trucks hauling the pods to other bases, before returning to the base itself and blowing up the warehouse of stored chemical agents that Steve had come there to inspect, a move which proves quickly and decisively lethal to the base's population of pod-duplicates.

However, its definitely an ambiguous finish, to put it lightly. Marti's voice over reveals that she has essentially been overcome by hate in the wake of the loss of her entire family, and even though the pair of attempts to duplicate her ultimately failed, she may already have lost the most important aspects of her humanity. The last blows to a real victory come as Tim is bringing his chopper in for a landing at another military-base in Atlanta, where Marti muses that a person can only stay awake so long. And as if to punctuate that sobering message, we once again hear pod-Carol's haunting words, pitched down an octave for effect:

"Where you gonna go, where you gonna run, where you gonna hide? Nowhere.'Cause there's no one... like you... left"

Damn.

In closing, all issues aside, and even though I'm not as impressed by it as I was when I originally watched it on home-video back in the VHS rental-days, this is still a good film that has been unfairly overlooked and underrated for pretty much its entire existence. If you haven't seen it, I really think you should give it a shot.

Three-and-a-half stars (***1/2), recommended.