The Invasion

Nicole Kidman headlines the latest screen version of Jack Finney's venerable novel "The Body Snatchers," playing an emotionally stiff Washington, D.C., psychiatrist who notices that everyone around her starts acting even more emotionally constipated than she does. It's an alien invasion from within, a spore from outer space that colonizes the human body while it sleeps, turning victims into coldly logical creatures bent on taking over the world -- by vomiting on them! (Seriously, that's how they spread the infection.) The casting of Kidman and Daniel Craig (the tough, new James Bond, here sporting a Cary Grant lilt) as the human resistance front is somewhat puzzling -- they're as emotionally restrained as the snatched hordes swarming the streets. Maybe that's why the film, credited to German director Oliver Hirschbiegel, underwent an 11th-hour makeover from the Wachowski brothers and their directing protégé James McTeigue. They apparently added more action scenes but failed to ratchet up the tension or add an atmosphere of paranoia in the process, and the irony of the ending is as unsatisfying as it is hollow. Jeremy Northam plays Kidman's ex-husband turned zombie alien-spawn who plots to convert their son -- one interesting reading of the film sees it as a swipe against Scientology, with Kidman fighting the forces of complacent conformity and Northam as a brainwashed Tom Cruise -- and Jeffrey Wright, Veronica Cartwright, Josef Sommer and Roger Rees co-star.

The DVD features the short documentary "We've Been Snatched Before: Invasion in Media History," a survey of the ideas and adaptations that came before, and a trio of brief, rudimentary making-of featurettes. Also available in HD DVD and Blu-ray formats.