What Went Wrong:
The Invasion
By Shalimar Sahota
March 3, 2011
BoxOfficeProphets.com
Recut, rewritten and reshot by another director, although The Invasion was all finished and ready to go for a summer release in 2006, the film was delayed for a year. Rewrites and reshoots are nothing new, yet The Invasion’s was well publicized, with the Wachowski Brothers suddenly getting involved, a car crash involving its lead star, and the resulting film having its whole final third changed.
Jack Finney’s novel, The Body Snatchers, had already been adapted to film three times before, as Invasion of the Body Snatchers, in 1956 and 1978. Warner Bros’ first attempt came with Abel Ferrara’s Body Snatchers, in 1993.
Warner hired David Kajganich to have a second stab at writing another adaptation. Producer Joel Silver explained how Kajganich’s script was “wonderful” and took “a fresh approach to the ideas in the novel.” Kajganich described how he wanted to write something that was, “deeply scary, but also deeply meaningful.” Silver brought in Oliver Hirschbiegel to direct after he was blown away by his work on the World War II drama Downfall. The Invasion would be Hirschbiegel’s first English language feature film. Silver was psyched up, describing in a press conference before the film was shot, that, “Oliver's way of shooting it is very exciting.”
The film begins with a space shuttle crashing to Earth, and some unknown "thing" attached to the craft starts to spread among the population. In the middle of it all is psychiatrist Carol (Nicole Kidman), who first picks up on something after one of her patients, Wendy (Veronica Cartwright), tells her that her husband is no longer her husband. When out trick-or-treating with her son Oliver (Jackson Bond), she discovers some weird dead skin like substance. She just so happens to be in a relationship with Ben (Daniel Craig), a doctor. Along with his friend Dr. Galeano (Jeffrey Wright), they analyze the substance and discover that it takes over a person’s brain while they sleep.
Filming took place in 2005, from September to December. Hirschbiegel must have delivered his cut of the film sometime in early 2006, since the film was to be released a few months later in the summer. However, The Invasion disappeared from the release schedules. It’s believed that Hirschbiegel’s film was screen tested, and the buzz wasn’t very good.
“We saw the movie,” said Silver. “It didn't work the way we wanted,” which seemed a more polite way of saying that it probably wasn’t very good. Also, “we” meant that clearly more than one person at Warner appeared to be unhappy with what they saw. So, Silver brought in the "bar-raising" Wachowski Brothers to rewrite the script. “Larry and Andy didn't do more then help conceive and envision some action elements,” said Silver. However, it’s rumored that they did a lot more than that, having made changes to the whole script - the most prolific being the final 20 minutes, which included a car chase and a more positive ending, with a cure for those infected being administered at inoculation centers.
It’s worth nothing that Warner did not fire Hirschbiegel from the production, nor was he all that upset with the Wachowski’s involvement. “They came up with some surprisingly smart suggestions,” said Hirschbiegel. “Some of their suggestions pissed me off because the pages were just better than what I had shot.” He also mentioned that despite his offer, the Wachowski’s declined to take any credit - though it was worrying when Silver said of the reshoots, “The Wachowski’s always help us,” which makes one wonder just how many films they’ve actually worked on in an uncredited role.
The reshoots didn’t take place till January 2007, enough time for its star Daniel Craig to go film and promote Casino Royale. Hirschbiegel was asked to come back, but was unavailable, having to leave due to a family illness. So in came V For Vendetta’s James McTeigue (also uncredited), directing for a few weeks. Craig seemed unfazed, saying, “The only reason to go back and reshoot is to get the film right.”
The Wachowski’s had scripted a scene where Carol and her son escape in a Jaguar that just so happens to have a number of infected people clinging upon it. The filming of this scene had the car actually being towed. The stunt driver lost control when turning, with Kidman’s Jaguar crashing sideways into a lamppost. Her and her co-star Jackson Bond were thankfully both wearing seatbelts and didn’t suffer any serious injury. It was just a matter of hours before the footage of the crash appeared online.
According to someone on the IMDb forums named "BuddySystemLA" (who claims to have worked on the film and viewed Hirschbiegel’s original cut of Kajganich’s untampered script), it’s believed that Warner (and test audiences) weren’t too keen on Hirschbiegel’s more ambiguous conclusion. A lot of what he says, particularly in regards to reusing footage that Hirschbiegel shot, appears to ring true. From his description, apparently the original ending had Carol and her son Oliver meet up with a group of survivors at a pharmacy store. When Carol explains that her son is immune and a possible cure for the infection, they band together, agreeing to help her reach the top of a building where a helicopter will come to collect them. However, the trip proves perilous as many survivors become infected and Oliver himself is attacked and becomes unconscious. While Carol and Oliver make it to the helicopter, it is left unanswered if Oliver survives and if they do cure the infection.
The Invasion had a production budget of $80 million (the extra few weeks of filming meant another $10 million added to the budget). Nicole Kidman was reportedly paid $17 million for her role. It opened in the US on August 17, 2007, with Warner booking the film into just over 2,700 venues. It managed to rank at #5 in the US top ten with a dreadful opening weekend of $5.9 million. As a comparison, this was the same weekend that the R-rated Superbad reached #1 with a take of $33 million. Warner had gone all out to get the film rewritten and reshot, but apparently when it came to promoting the film, they just didn’t seem to care anymore. It finished its run with a domestic gross of just $15 million. Add in international grosses of $25 million, and the final total of $40 million overall made it one of the biggest flops of the last decade. Oh dear.
For potential audiences, the well-publicized reports on production problems didn’t bode well, and the largely negative reviews confirmed it. Also, audiences weren’t warming to Kidman, with her last few films as a lead (The Stepford Wives, The Interpreter, Bewitched) showing a downward spiral at the box office. Kidman recently admitted in a German magazine, called TV Movie, that she had “tried Botox,” but no longer uses it, saying, “I didn’t like how my face looked afterwards.” It’s quite possible it was during this shoot, since she effectively comes across as emotionless when trying to pass off as one of the infected.
One could argue that there wasn’t anything wrong with the film to begin with, and Warner simply decided to turn a good film into a bad one. The lack of Hirschbiegel’s version makes this difficult to determine, but Warner wouldn’t go out of their way to spend $10 million on reshoots unless there was something seriously wrong with the film. Watching it, there’s a knowing sense that it’s been hacked up, given the 90 minute running time, and the editing itself (throughout the film we see scenes take place as the characters talk about them), suggesting that there’s a whole chunk missing. It also looks like it was edited to a PG-13 to make it more accessible. As Carol guns down a number of infected people, the shot is strangely blurred and there is a distinct lack of blood. It isn’t scary, and some scenes are unintentionally funny, notably the outcome of Carol taking a picture of an infected person.
As it is, The Invasion is a simple rehash; another tired variation on the same old "fear of the unknown" story. Although a lot of time is spent on Carol trying to find her son, this didn’t really offer anything new. Setting it in a different part of the world could have made for a nice change, maybe even offering a crazy background on the alien species itself and why they want to take over. It might even have been more fun to have a story just focusing on the children during that one Halloween night, rather than the adults; something along the lines of Robert Rodriguez’s The Faculty, which is as close to an original take on Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Maybe we can expect something similar from the soon to be released Attack the Block.
It’s quite possible that both versions are as bad as each other (what was screened theatrically certainly was), and another adaptation just shouldn’t have been attempted in the first place.