First published in 1955, Jack Finney's novella The Body Snatchers enjoyed a five-decade run in which it seemed incapable of inspiring anything less than haunting films. Don Siegel's 1956 attempt, Invasion Of The Body Snatchers, echoed anti-Communist paranoia but muddied the message by making the bad guys take the form of bland '50s suburbanites. In 1978, Philip Kaufman used it as an excuse to look at Me-Decade myopia. Abel Ferrara's little-seen 1993 version (called simply Body Snatchers) channeled the unquestioning nationalism stirred by Desert Storm. Even Robert Rodriguez's unofficial high school remake The Faculty wasn't bad, and each film had something cutting to say about the times that inspired it. The new The Invasion at least acknowledges this tradition of timeliness, filling its backdrops with footage from 24-hour news channels and letting grim reports crackle over radio speakers. Unfortunately, that's little more than set dressing for an unchallenging film.
