As I noted yesterday, there have been four adaptations of the Body Snatchers story – in 1956, 1978, 1993, and 2007, that’s roughly about once every twenty years. We are just about due for a new one, though the 2007 version did so poorly I expect we won’t get one. It is interesting to think about what new spins they could put on the story.

With smartphones and social media, one could easily make a connection between staring blankly into your phone and being an alien pod person.

The 2007 version entitled The Invasion is the worst adaptation of the four. Body Snatchers wasn’t great but at least it had a point of view. It was trying to say something interesting. The Invasion does nothing new and feels rather generic. It runs like a standard 2000s thriller.

Ok, it does do a few things slightly different from the other adaptations but none of them are particularly interesting. The alien spores are attached to a space shuttle that explodes high in the atmosphere scattering its parts (and with it the aliens) across the globe. In this version, the spores do not turn into pods that transform into clones of individual humans, but when ingested it changes each person in some fundamental biological way.

Nicole Kidman is Carol a psychologist whose patients are some of the first to recognize something strange is going on. People who have been infected by the aliens (and in this version, the invasion is very much like a viral infection) get a sticky substance on their skin when they are first infected but it doesn’t completely take control until they fall into R.E.M sleep.

Carol gets infected and so much of the drama comes from her trying to stay awake. She also has to find her boy because they got separated before she realized what was going on.

For that part, it isn’t a bad little thriller. There are some exciting action-oriented scenes but as a Body Snatcher adaptation, it doesn’t work at all.

The strength of this story comes from the paranoia of finding out the people surrounding you, sometimes the people you love have become aliens. The two most modern adaptations don’t seem to understand that. They substitute cheap thrills for something deeper and more threatening.

With three other adaptations to choose from, this sone is completely skippable.