On September 26, 2005 in Baltimore, MD a man named Oliver Hirschbiegel began filming a little movie called The Invasion. The film was a remake of the 1976 film, Invasion of the Body-Snatchers, which was itself a remake of a 1956 Body-Snatchers film. Hirschbiegel was famous for directing a (German) made for TV movie called Der Untergang, which was released in the US as Downfall. That film won critical accolades, an academy award nomination, and most importantly mad parody hits on Youtube. The Invasion did not fare as well. The film was shelved for over a year immediately after he finished production. The Wachowski Brothers(Brother and Sister?) were hired to re-write and re-shoot it in 2007. The resulting film is a kind of mixed-masterpiece. It is the story of an erstwhile invasion of microbial alien creatures that consume the erase the personality of their host whilst connecting them to a kind of phermonal consciousness shared between the other ‘invaded’ subjects. In a matter of days most of the country is taken over. We see video of US troops being withdrawn from Iraq while President Bush embraces Hugo Chavez. Ordinary folks move through the city in quiet, ordered precision while Nicole Kidman lurks, terrified at the implications of what is happening. When she discovers that her son, immune to the pathogen because of the measles or something, will be disposed of – she swings into action. Kidman stars with Daniel Craig and Jeffrey Wright as a the scientists who resist these aliens. I was impressed with the film’s tenacious resistance to “telling” the audience everything that was happening. Instead, we receive information through terse implication. There are no explosions or gun battles. There are no breathless ejaculations of exposition. Instead the film relies on psychology and the trusts that the audience can infer the stakes. In this sense I think the film is remarkable and, evidently, unbankable. Hirshbiegel hasn’t made another feature since.
This movie leads to a larger discussion about the aesthetics of story-telling: how does a ‘good’ filmmaker utilize characters in a movie? We must be aware that a big budget movie requires justification with the presence of a Nicole Kidman or a Daniel Craig (the film followed shortly after the release and success of Casino Royale). And we ought to be wise enough to realize that big budget actors aren’t really playing a part for the audience – they’re playing themselves in a movie. I like Nicole Kidman. I think she excells at depicting wounded, intelligent women. She has occupied a niche as a kind of archetypal classy, single mother in distress. The Invasion relies on this. Daniel Craig is (or was, when the film was released) a bit of an enigma. I think he was wise to reach for a career outside of James Bond and here we get a sense that he can play smart as well as he can play deranged. But this film’s greatest strength and its inherent weakness lie tied together in its willingness to imply that Kidman and Craig aren’t the only character with lives and hopes and dreams at stake. The film’s takes careful pains to collude its narrative with the stories of other citizens of the District. In a scene that is magically terrifying, Kidman boards a metro train with a group of uninfected survivors. These characters are aware of the invasion and have resisted. She is warned by another passenger that she must remain calm. The scene betrays itself when it only allows for her to escape from the aliens but the director trusts these non-essential actors with a surprising chunk of time. In several other scenes the director tears the camera from Kidman or the other A-listers to show us the stories of other characters who are making essential choices. This is a movie that does something that blockbusters rarely have the brains to even attempt – it implies other movies and other stories. I wonder, what would a companion to this film featuring one of these characters look like? TV shows like The Office and Frank Darabont’s increasingly disappointing adaptation of Robert Kirkham’s The Walking Dead attempt this as well by featuring second-and tertiary characters in webisodes. The difference is in the elegant staging and, again, the implication of these characters’ choices. When we see Kidman stop beneath a skyscraper in midtown DC want watch a couple on its roof embrace and then leap we understand that a moral choice has been made and it is crucial to enhancing our understanding of what is at stake in this story. This isn’t just a cheap lunge at our wallets, this is storytelling.
Of course there is a scene which paradoxically betrays our trust by going “full blockbuster” on a group of non-A listers. Kidman makes plans to meet Craig in a pharmacy. She encounters a group of “crowd” characters who are undergoing the change from human to alien. One is a police officer. She takes his gun and e locks them in a bathroom. They are furious when they wake up. When a now-infected Craig arrives and opens the door she shoots these people in the coldest blood. When Craig is the only one left she doesn’t murder him (because he’s a big actor) she just shoots him in the leg and leaves him bellowing in pain. Why couldn’t she have done that with the others? The only things that this choice accomplishes is that it establishes that her characterization is non-standard and amenable to the whim of whichever group of executives and directors who happened to be crafting the scene at the time. There is no integrity in this construction. We had previously been led to believe that she was a doctor, interested in healing and horrified by the prospect of causing violence. Then this. This makes her into a certifiable “Joss Whedon Strong Female Character” which is to say, a character who is attractive but unstable owing to a complete lack of artistic integrity.
In this way we see a larger principle at play – big movies treat non-big name characters like props and expect that all we, as an audience want, is to see them die. This principle explains how we know the order characters will die in a horror movie or how we know which members of the elite team of Navy Seal Operatives are and are not going to make it through their final mission before retirement. Its why we understand that black male characters won’t end up with white female characters. These predictions fall to formula and indicate one resounding and frustrating truth: big movies will always sacrifice story for cheap thrills and big movie directors will always give way for gimicks over storytelling.
We Watch 