“It is something that is happening everywhere to everyone. So… where you gonna go? Where you gonna run? Where you gonna hide? Nowhere. ‘Cause there’s no one like you left.”
While I wouldn’t say I’m completely unaffected by the jingoistic stupidity of films like Independence Day, I’ll take a quiet alien invasion almost any day of the week. Body Snatchers is the third of the four films officially based on Jack Finney’s 1955 novel. It’s at least the second or third best, depending on how you rank the first: 1956’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers. I mean, pretty much everyone agrees that the 1978 film is the best of the bunch, right? This one is no slouch either, though, which becomes immediately unsettling under the unusual direction of Abel Ferrara, turning in his first big budget Hollywood film.
With a story worked on by Larry Cohen and Stuart Gordon (separately, I imagine, as they are credited with different types of authorship), the film is confined to an Alabama military base. It’s a move that heightens the claustrophobic tension, the themes of conformity, and the utter hopelessness of the situation. The snatcher scenes are the stuff of nightmares. The pacing is like freeform jazz in the sense that not everyone will get it. Just like I don’t get freeform jazz.
An EPA official arrives, family in tow, to take samples around the base, which stores dangerous wartime chemicals. The main character of the film is the environmental agent’s teenage daughter Marti (Gabrielle Anwar), who spends much of the opening act rolling her eyes at her step mother (Meg Tilly) and her annoying half-brother. Marti quickly strikes up a friendship with the general’s rebellious daughter and forms a romance with a helicopter pilot (Billy Wirth, who you may recognize as one of The Lost Boys). R. Lee Ermey plays the general (of course) and Forest Whitaker has a small but potent role as the major who is concerned with the paranoia that’s spreading through the infirmary… which isn’t, technically speaking, paranoia at all.
In one chilling scene, Marti’s little brother goes to daycare and discovers his classmates are all finger painting the exact same image. The scene suggests that the snatchers have already taken all the children. The boy is the first in the family to suspect that things are not as they seem. His suspicions are confirmed when he accidentally walks in on a snatching in progress. The imagery is terrifying. Mind you, there’s hardly any blood in the entire film, but it still feels like it contains exactly what horror fans want to see (you know… the stuff we kinda don’t want to see). I don’t think the snatcher screams are quite up to par, but the unusually good character work and the fine filmmaking go a long way toward making this a solid genre flick.
So yeah, at no moment does a character say, “Get me the President on the line.” There aren’t any shots of people standing on the streets to watch as some mega structure fills the sky. At absolutely no time will you believe the humans stand a fighting chance, barring moments when the movie is fucking with you. There is a moment, early on, in which one of the neighbors carries a small bag of trash out to the garbage truck. It’s so small you wonder, “Why would someone bother taking a bag of trash out that small? Hell, why would the director bother to film it?” Sometime later we learn exactly what’s in that bag, shifting the moment from a non sequitur to an unsettling detail.
In one scene, Forest Whitaker’s character is cornered and has to choose between resisting the dominant power, which will lead to death, or joining them, which would be so much easier. It’s a powerful moment in which the viewers have no choice but to imagine themselves in his shoes. Unfortunately, the same scene contains the film’s biggest misstep: when it awkwardly features a monologue explaining the snatchers’ motivation. That kind of tripe sticks out like a sore thumb in an otherwise atypical movie. I have a feeling Ferrara didn’t like it, either, as I’m pretty sure this is the last mainstream movie he ever did. I can’t help but wonder if the ending was a major compromise between auteur and studio as well because it kind of does neither very well.
