The film builds upon the 1956 flick of the same name (itself adapted from a 1954 Jack Finney novel), a creepy and understated thriller with shades of noir about a doctor (Kevin McCarthy) who discovers that the inhabitants of his northern California town are being replaced with emotionless alien duplicates hatched from giant seed pods.
Invasion of the Body Snatchers Remains the Ultimate Paranoid Thriller
The original channeled B-movie ingredients into a sci-fi classic, its on-the-run scenes deservedly iconic and its themes of infiltration by malevolent forces widely interpreted in the context of Cold War anxieties. Yet the film is slightly weighted by first-act explication and hampered by a clumsy, FBI-saves-the-day coda mandated by studio execs (“The studio felt that the film was too downbeat,” recalled McCarthy in a DVD extra).
Such compromises did not plague the Invasion of the Body Snatchers that emerged during the New Hollywood era, when creative power shifted away from studios and towards “auteur” directors. With Philip Kaufman at the helm, the film did what a remake is supposed to, upgrading a great story for a new generation and a headier filmmaking style.. .
[. . .] Indeed, part of the enduring power of
Invasion of the Body Snatchers is just how malleable its
paranoia feels to different particularities. Watch the film today, and
you’ll be struck by how the specter of an invasive urban threat
spreading from person to person while warnings go unheeded evokes the
pandemic. Fifty years from now, it will probably evoke some other
calamity. Every year, Kevin McCarthy’s words ring clearer and truer:
“Help! Help! They’re coming! They’re coming! You’re next!”
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