Tagline: Do not trust anyone. Do not show emotion. Do not fall asleep.
The Invasion movie storyline. A massive explosion lights up the skies from Dallas to Washington, DC, shattering the space shuttle Patriot into pieces that rain down across the U.S. The authorities are quick to seize control of the situation, but stories emerge about a strange substance found clinging to the wreckage — something that withstood the extreme cold of space and searing heat of reentry to get here. And the first to come in contact with it are the first to change… But no one wants to start a panic.
DC psychiatrist Carol Bennell does not connect what happened to the shuttle with the bizarre occurrences that seem to accelerate around her: one of her patients is terrified that her husband has been replaced by a stranger; violent outbursts on the streets are quickly subdued; and a very strange substance comes home in her son Oliver’s Halloween candy—something that might, in fact, be alive. She tells her friend and fellow doctor, Ben Driscoll, that something is very wrong despite the fact that Washington does not seem concerned. The official word is that it’s simply a new form of flu, but before realizing the weight of what’s happening Carol lets Oliver spend the weekend with his estranged dad, a high-level official with the Center for Disease Control, who is in Washington investigating the crash and was one of the first people on the scene.
As the epidemic spreads, Carol discovers that the very people in charge of inoculation against it are spreading something far worse—a spore of unknown origin that attacks human DNA while the host sleeps, remaking it in the image of a lifeform that looks like us and talks like us, but with all human emotion drained away. Seemingly overnight, the people around her are transformed into hive-like beings with one imperative: to infect others and take control. Doing everything in her power to stay awake, Carol embarks on a desperate journey into a changed world to stay alive long enough to find her son. To hide among them, she will have to remain calm…betray no emotion…and, most of all, not fall asleep.
The Invasion is a 2007 science fiction horror thriller film starring Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig, directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel, with additional scenes written by The Wachowskis and directed by James McTeigue. The Invasion is the fourth film adaptation of the 1955 novel The Body Snatchers by Jack Finney, following Don Siegel’s 1956 film Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Philip Kaufman’s 1978 remake Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and Abel Ferrara’s 1993 Body Snatchers.
“No one touches my child”
Against the broad backdrop of an insidious invasion is an intimate story of a handful of characters brought together by creeping suspicions that manifest themselves in very real, terrifying ways—starting with Carol Bennell, so named as a nod to the book’s main character, Miles Bennell. Kidman plays the DC-area psychiatrist who finds herself in the eye of the storm when one of her patients expresses fear that “her husband is no longer her husband.”
Actress Veronica Cartwright, who appeared in the 1978 classic “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” plays Carol’s troubled patient, Wendy Lenk, who believes her husband’s entire persona has changed. “Carol does not associate what her patient tells her with the shuttle crash,” notes Silver. “No one, least of all a psychiatrist, would jump to the conclusion of an alien infection when someone fears that a person they know and love has changed. Instead, she looks to the tools of her profession. Is this delusion? In real terms, the truth is so unthinkable that what’s actually happening doesn’t occur to anyone until it’s too late.”
For Hirschbiegel, the character of Carol is the lens through which the story is told. “Everything is centered around her, seen from her perspective. Nicole brought so much of herself to this role in terms of her strength and her absolutely primal need to protect her child,” the director states. “Her ability to immerse herself in the world of the story was fascinating to observe and capture on film. Her reactions felt very natural, which really heightened the urgency of her character’s situation.”
As Carol looks into her patient’s fears, she discovers that similar fears are popping up all over the country. Could it be a mass delusion, or a very real phenomenon tied somehow to the space shuttle crash? Carol shares her suspicions with her closest friend, Ben Driscoll, a doctor at a busy DC hospital. Ben is played by Daniel Craig, who acknowledges, “It’s a platonic relationship, but of course he’s madly in love with her. He wants to take care of her. He sees her going through a messy situation with her ex-husband and their son, and he’s not pushing it, but his dream would be to be with her.”
“I felt so fortunate to have Daniel in the role of Ben,” Hirschbiegel remarks. “He naturally conveyed all the facets of his character: all the toughness, the intelligence and the tenderness that makes you see why Carol relies on Ben so much. Daniel also has a wicked sense of humor. I had a great time working with him.”
Working for the first time with Kidman, Craig was equally impressed with his co-star’s dual propensities for the seriousness of the role and the ability to have fun on set. “She’s a fantastic actress,” he says. “She’s just got so much depth; for me, it was a joy working with her.”
Kidman is likewise appreciative of her co-star. “Daniel is such a fine actor,” she says. “He has an enormous amount of talent. You want to have people around you who inspire you and who are so good at what they do, because then it’s fun to come to work every day. The thing that I just love are those moments between action and cut when anything can happen—to be able to get lost in those moments and lost in the scenes. It’s what draws me back time and time again.”
All you have to do is nothing
Coinciding with the weekend of the shuttle crash, Carol has been contacted out of the blue by her estranged husband, Tucker, played by Jeremy Northam. An official with the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), Tucker is brought to Washington, DC, to investigate the residue on the space shuttle debris and becomes one of the first to be infected by it. His sudden desire to exercise his rarely used visitation rights with his and Carol’s son, Oliver, seems uncharacteristic of him and gets Carol’s guard up. “There is a history between them that is not exactly pleasant, so that colors our knowledge of Tucker right from the start,” says Northam. “He is a senior official at CDC, which has taken him to Atlanta for a long time and now he’s back in Washington. The fact that in the midst of all this he’s so anxious to see his son is worrisome to his ex-wife, and of course he has ulterior motives.
Whatever contagion the shuttle carried to Earth is rapidly spreading as those who are infected are driven to infect others. “Snatchers don’t kill people,” comments Hirschbiegel. “They radically change them from the inside once they’re infected. They transform regular people into something else.”
“You get infected and then the process is completed when you fall asleep,” adds Craig. “When you go into REM (Rapid Eye Movement) sleep, that’s the catalyst which creates this change that takes over your whole body on a DNA level.”
The CDC mounts an emergency national inoculation plan to combat what it names to be a powerful flu, but the truth of the serum is the reverse of inoculation. “In one scene, Tucker is lecturing government officials about this virus and the need to fight it but in reality he’s using the meeting to infect everyone in the room,” explains Silver. “They organize this magnificent campaign, and soon the number of Snatchers grows exponentially.”
“When you’ve been snatched, you look a little better, a little healthier, stronger,” Hirschbiegel describes. “It messes around with your genetic code. Snatchers like order—not like robots, but they don’t respond to anything emotionally. They go into a serene, weird state.”
Seemingly overnight, the colorful, chaotic everyday world is transformed into a muted world of organization, starting first with the keepers of order. “The Snatchers are not dumb,” adds David Kajganich. “The first people they infect are the people who will be most useful to them in their campaign. So, they infect people who are in high-ranking positions in government, law enforcement and commerce to pave the way for a smooth, quick invasion of the rest of us. Efficiency is a big word for describing how Snatchers behave—in the most efficient way possible.”
Increasingly surrounded by people who want to change her into one of them, Carol has only one urgent objective: to save her son, who is now with his father for the weekend and who Carol now realizes is in terrible danger.
Playing her son, Oliver, is a young actor named Jackson Bond, making his feature film debut. “He’s just a darling,” comments Kidman. “He’s the sweetest, kindest boy. He has these elements of being a man, and then he has these childlike responses to things. So, he’s this wonderful mix. And he has great parents, and you can see the work they’ve put in. We got very, very lucky in casting him because he has never made a film before.”
Oliver is unique in that while he does go to sleep after being infected, he does not change. “He is immune from this infection and somehow holds the key to finding a cure,” explains Jackson Bond. But to avoid detection, Oliver and his mother have to attempt to pass themselves off as Snatchers. “You can’t show any emotions because then they’ll figure out that you’re not one and start chasing you,” he says. “So, you’re trying to pretend to be one but you’re still really scared and don’t know what to do.”
Oliver’s immunity to the alien contagion is a crucial discovery to the team of scientists working frantically to find a cure. Jeffrey Wright plays Ben’s friend and colleague, Dr. Stephen Galeano, who has been researching the growing epidemic since Carol and Ben first brought him a sample of the mysterious alien substance.
Safely sequestered, Galeano has been interfacing with other scientists working underground to find a way to fight its insidious effects. Daniel Craig offers, “From the moment he first encounters the sickness, he looks at it on a molecular level, and he jumps to the right conclusion that it’s not from this planet. So Galeano represents hope against this seemingly unstoppable invasion.”
While Kajganich adapted the story for the screen, he did not imagine how brutal it would be when brought to life by the cast. “One of the main characters of the film is infected in broad daylight in a suburban home,” he recalls, “and to me, it was a much more disturbing scene than graphic screen violence. Watching the actors play that out, I had to look away. I couldn’t believe it was as upsetting as it was. You feel the human weight of what’s going on because the cast is comprised of such brilliant actors; it’s incredibly raw and real. You’re watching it happen before your eyes and you start to believe it, even when standing on a movie set.”
Silver says he could not have asked for a more perfect cast to bring the personal fears of the characters to palpable life. “Everyone did a fantastic job with this material. All the players worked together under Oliver’s direction to create a creepy, uncomfortable feeling of this invasion, starting with Nicole, who is in nearly every shot of the film and really anchors the story with her emotional presence.”
Kidman’s character experiences the invasion from the point of view of a psychiatrist, so the actress consulted with professionals to explore the processes a psychiatrist would go through. “My father is a psychologist, so I grew up with that,” she explains. “But it was so interesting to sit down with a female psychiatrist who was based in New York. She was very helpful, I think, just in terms of body language and the way in which you deal with particularly extreme emotions. But obviously, the film isn’t about the therapy sessions.”
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The Invasion (2007)
Directed by: Oliver Hirschbiegel
Starring: Nicole Kidman, Daniel Craig, Jeremy Northam, Malin Akerman, Jackson Bond, Jeffrey Wright, Celia Weston, Veronica Cartwright, Josef Sommer, Susan Floyd, Alexis Raben, Joanna Merlin
Screenplay by: Dave Kajganich
Production Design by: Jack Fisk
Cinematography by: Rainer Klausmann
Film Editing by: Hans Funck, Joel Negron
Costume Design by: Jacqueline West
Set Decoration by: Leslie McCarthy-Frankenheimer, Maria Nay
Art Direction by: Caty Maxey, James F. Truesdale
Music by: John Ottman
MPAA Rating: PG-13 for violence, disturbing content and terror.
Distributed by: Warner Bros. Pictures
Release Date: August 17, 2007
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