The Invasion: Critic Reviews

The Invasion gets you rooting for the aliens to be defeated, but the film's soul feels as if it had already been snatched.

The latest and lamest version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers might have been an accidental camp classic if its politics weren't so abhorrent and the movie didn't try to hide its ineptitude behind a veil of pomposity.

Next time the aliens come invading, they may want to pass the brains, hold the lecture.

Has several first-rate, terrifying action sequences and grips totally from start to finish.

In the way that certain baseball games become pitchers' duels, some movies are cutting-room battles.

There is nothing here to be taken seriously, let alone fear.

Except for one terrifically adroit sequence in a subway, there is nothing understated about The Invasion.

Resistance is futile -- unless your screenplay can offer pat, absurd plot turns.

The movie offers plenty of smarts and imaginative distractions to counter the stacking of improbabilities.

If you're familiar with the earlier films, The Invasion is even less satisfying.

If the first three movies served as parables for their times, this one keeps shooting off parable rockets that fizzle out. How many references in the same movie can you have to the war in Iraq and not say anything about it?

[It's] far from the worst thriller of the year, but it's wholly lacking in reasons for being.

[It] may not be a patch on the original, but it does have a few things the other versions lack: a nonstop lurching pace propelled by jump cuts and flash-forwards, Nicole Kidman as the hero... and a bitter kind of satiric irony leaking around the edges.

The Invasion is mostly about delivering thrills, and chills, and this it does with moderate success and a bunch of fast, no-nonsense edits.

The Invasion is a science fiction nightmare, the spectacle of actors who can do first-rate work trapped in a soul-destroying mechanism created by madmen.

It might have been nice to see Hirschbiegel's original concept play out. As it is, the film's essential eeriness gets mashed into Hollywood hogwash.

If you're going to remake a movie a third time, you'd better have a compelling reason.

A slick but forgettable, characterless thriller.

Nicole Kidman's character struggles to stay awake -- as will the audience.

The script doesn't find ways to comment on our fearful times.

We'll have to wait until the inevitable director's cut DVD to find out what Hirschbiegel really wanted to say. It would have to be a whole lot more interesting than this accidental agit-prop, which equates pacifism with mindlessness.

'The Invasion': Oliver Hirschbiegel's take on Jack Finney's classic story is subtly political, commenting ever so slyly on the apathy and indifference - and the lack of empathy and compassion - that have taken over since 9/11, as well as the sense of enti

A movie that is ultimately a soulless clone of a vibrant original and, thus, a splendidly dull example of the very forces it warns us against -- the forces of grey and passion-sapping conformity.

Gratuitously violent [and] soullessly brain dead.

It falls far short as an effective sci-fi thriller, not to mention the brainy political allegory it's determined to be.