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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.

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