The Invasion

A Washington, D.C., psychiatrist (Nicole Kidman) and her hunky medical researcher friend (Daniel Craig) battle an alien virus that stealthily recodes human DNA to make creepy even-keeled drones of us all. On the bright side, the virus also makes big human problems—Iraq, Darfur, North Korea—go away. Until now, each adaptation of Jack Finney’s novel The Body Snatchers has striven for a context of topical relevance, be it the Red Scary ’50s, the Post-Nixon, me-decade ’70s, or the insouciantly militaristic Gulf War ’90s. This one, written by David Kajganich and directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel, with conspicuously tacky help from the Wachowski bothers of Matrix fame and their protégé James McTeigue of V for Vendetta, seems confused. It manages the limply indignant point that Washington has become a nest of soulless automatons bent on self-propagation, but squanders the irony of the alabaster-skinned Kidman, famously something of a pod person herself, coming off as the most human presence on the screen.