The Invasion

I’m watching a sci-fi movie starring Nicole Kidman because, seriously, she is just so smoking hot I will watch anything with her in it, and there are plenty of gratuitous scenes of her in her underwear, but “The Invasion” is so incredibly, godawful bad that I am kind of embarrassed to be watching it.
It’s pretty much a straight up rip-off of “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” but that in itself is not a bad thing. That is a great film, in both the 1956 and 1978 versions, and alien beings taking over human bodies and making them act all out of character is a Star Trek staple.
As an action thriller, there are plenty of car crashes, chases, explosions, etc…to keep most people happy. But, the writing is unbelievably lazy. The Russian ambassador, at a dinner party at the Czech embassy in D.C., refers to ‘Czechoslovakia.’ Now, one thing I do when I’m watching films is to try and guess the year in which it is set, or at least the century if it’s people riding on horses and wielding swords. People are using mobile phones and the kids are playing fairly sophisticated video games in this, so I assumed it was fairly recent. After that snippet of conversation, I thought maybe I was wrong, so looked it up. Made in 2007. So, that’s 14 years ago, but it’s also 14 years after Czechoslovakia ceased to exist.
I can’t believe the writers didn’t know that. I can’t believe no script editors caught that. I can’t believe the actor who was playing the Russian ambassador mouthed the lines without objecting that it was the stupidest thing he’d ever heard. Well, actually, I can believe that last one. Actors are paid to recite lines, not to know anything about world geography, or to care. But the writers and editors, for sure.
So, I turned it off in the middle. Just checked Rotten Tomatoes. Critics gave it 19% and the public gave it 40%. I’d say this time the critics got it right.