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GLENN KENNY'S REVIEW (posted 8/16/07)

Nicole Kidman's inability to understand the question "How can we miss you if you won't go away?" turns out to be the least of the problems of this noisome, fragmented mess of a movie, the fourth film based on Jack Finney's novel The Body Snatchers and the worst of them all. This English-language debut for German director Hirschbiegel was reportedly taken away by producer Joel Silver in tandem with various Warner execs, and underwent considerable re-shoots to pump up the action. A pod-people-chasing-a-car bit at the end, as well as other material, is rumored to be the work of The Matrix's Wachowski Brothers and their minions. Nice of them, I suppose, to include a proto-trailer of their upcoming Speed Racer in this picture. What it's got to do with anything else in the movie is anybody's guess.

Whereas the previous Body Snatchers movies, beginning with Don Siegel's 1956 classic, were slow-builds to the ultimate, apocalyptic awareness that "they're coming!" ("they" being the emotionless alien-possessed zombies created by an outer-space organism), in this picture it's only a half-hour in before the first is-she-crazy? non-zombie shows up screaming in the middle of a street, only to be brutally run down, of course. While the other Body Snatchers pictures had open-ended finales, this one presents a complete through-line, and boy is it a doozy. But one doesn't have to wait until then for the laughs. The picture begins with a space shuttle crash; at the site of the wreckage, a NASA scientist briefs CDC honcho Jeremy Northam on the organism that came in with the shuttle: "It's able to survive the bitter cold of space and the searing heat of reentry." Do tell. That's quite a literary NASA scientist you've got there.

Kidman here plays a psychiatrist (seriously, if you were in need of psychoanalytic help, would you trust a shrink who looked and acted like Nicole Kidman?) and devoted mother, albeit a devoted mother who parades around in front of her son first thing in the morning in see-through pajama bottoms. It is her single misfortune to be CDC honcho Northam's ex-wife. As Northam's already turned into a zombie by the time it's his turn to get little boy Oliver (Bond) for a visit, the situation is bound to lead to an interesting custody battle. Except — aha! — that little Oliver turns out to be immune to the alien virus that transforms you in your sleep, providing hope to doc Daniel Craig, who's Kidman's best friend and from whose rare romantic advances Kidman is for some reason obliged to icily withdraw. Yes, that's correct: This movie makes a gelding out of Daniel Craig.

None of the plot particulars, which merely become more and more ridiculous as the movie progresses, much matter as the filmmakers (whoever they really are) desperately try to pump up the tension volume at every turn. Their methods include pointless flash-forwards, strobe-like cutting, and so much "no one touches my child" hoo-ha from the Kidman character that one emerges from the theater just in the mood for a production of Medea. Every now and then we catch glimpses of the movie Hirschbiegel and screenwriter Dave Kajganich might have wanted to make — which appears to have been a mordant satire proposing that replacing humanity with non-emotional zombies might be better off for everybody. There's a funny fragment wherein CNN, playing in the background of one scene, reports peace breaking out in Iraq, Bush and Hugo Chavez making an oil deal, and so on. Would that have been a better movie than this? Almost anything would have been a better movie than this.

— Glenn Kenny