Cold Fusion Video Reviews

• Directed by Philip Kaufman
• Written by W.D. Richter, based on the novel by Jack Finney
• Starring
  • Donald Sutherland
  • Brooke Adams
  • Leonard Nimoy
  • Jeff Goldblum
  • Veronica Cartwright

This remake doesn’t exist in a vacuum, but I haven’t reviewed the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), so we need to head into a brief commentary on the original before we get to the subject at hand.

For some reason, people want to give facile explanations of what the original is “about.” Some insist (or even say offhand, as if it’s obvious) that the original is “about” the Red Scare of the ’50s, the idea of insidious Commie infiltrating a red-blooded American town. Others, from a perspective inside the movie industry, say almost the opposite, placing the narrative against the backdrop of the Hollywood community who were being assailed and accused by McCarthyite anti-Communists.

If the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers were a straight allegory, then it would make sense to argue which of those two interpretations (or other alternate ones) is true. But the original is not “about” either one of those more than the other. What the movie is “about” is not an allegory, but a theme; the theme is paranoia, and the fact that groups who thought themselves besieged at either end of the social continuum thought that the movie was “about” them shows just how universal the theme was. Yes, paranoia was definitely present in that post-war era, as Americans looked on their new-found prosperity and worried that something was taking it away, and the movie expresses that sense of anxiety in symbols and situations specific to the era, with an insidious force subverting the mainstream image of picket-fenced smalltown Utopia. But if the movie had only been “about” either of those two era-specific paranoid manifestations instead of the more generalized and universal anxiety behind it, then the power of the movie would have faded as the circumstances from which is sprung faded from the public sphere and retreated into the history books. Instead, the movie very strongly retains its power to shock and unsettle a modern audience, showing it to be an era-specific rendering of a deeper and more universal fear.

It’s San Francisco — everyone’s snorting something, right?

Twenty-two years later, American society had gone through the single largest cultural upheaval of U.S. history (and possibly world history). The America of 1978 was not the America of 1956, and any attempt to address paranoia using the same serpent-in-Eden lens would have been seen as horribly outdated (this is before nostalgia and “retro” became a charming part of pop culture). The remake takes flack in some corners for the liberties it takes with the preceding movie and Jack Finney’s novel on which it’s based. It’s a “reimagining” as complete as any recent Hollywood offering since the term was coined, but it also succeeds on its own terms, and if the original was successful in exploring the meaning of paranoia in its post-war era, the remake is at least as successful in recasting that same theme of paranoia in its own contemporary social climate.

The remake also knows that the audience will be familiar with the original (or, failing that, they’ll know from the trailers and the poster what kind of movie they’ve walked into), so there’s no reason to beat about the bush. Our first shot is of alien organisms (actually footage of some kind of transparent waterborne microbes) floating through space, to enter Earth’s atmosphere and come down with the rain over San Francisco. The little drops of clear goo stick to plant leaves, where they grow, sprout, and come up as a small green pod with a flower on one end. (I don’t know if it was an intentional irony that San Francisco, gathering spot of the “Flower Children,” is taken over by little flowers, but…)

In that great city, Matthew Bennell (Donald Sutherland) is a field agent for the Department of Public Health, which is a terrific occupation for the protagonist in this kind of movie. Unlike Dr. Bennell in the original (and I promise I won’t stop every paragraph to play compare-and-contrast), Matthew isn’t looked up to as a pillar of the community; in fact, most of the people he works with every day in the private sector hate him. But still he sees himself as a protector of the community, and he’s got well-developed investigative instincts.

Brooke Adams is introduced to us smelling a flower.  Donald Sutherland is introduced to us glaring at a rat turd.

Elizabeth (Brooke Adams) works with him on the laboratory and testing side of the DPH. She lives with her boyfriend Geoffrey (Art Hindle), who starts to act funny the day after she absently brings home a little flower she finds on a walking path. Actually, “funny” doesn’t begin to describe it; he’s secretive and acts as if all emotion has been drained from him. The only way she can say it is that “Geoffrey isn’t Geoffrey.” After a couple of days, she gives in to her “silly” paranoia and follows him all day as he travels around the city, meets with people of all walks of life in various places, and exchanges strange packages with them.

Matthew’s solution is for her to casually meet Dr. Kibner (Leonard Nimoy), a psychiatrist and bestselling author. For all of Nimoy’s talking of getting away from the Spock stigma in the ’70s, that kind of extra-textual identification certainly enriches the character of Dr. Kibner for us. I mean, he’s the voice of reason who turns out to be a pod person, an alien (whoops! Spoiler!) — and he’s the only pod person we meet who does a reasonable job of passing for human before his true nature is revealed. How could all of that not take on extra meaning with Nimoy in the role?

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Matthew starts to notice that others around the city are echoing Elizabeth’s concerns: the man at the Chinese laundry who insists, “That not my wife!”, the guest at Kibner’s book launch party who’s hysterical about going home with a husband who’s not her husband… Kibner (pre-pod person, one assumes) has seen an epidemic of such cases recently, and attributes it to some sort of dissociation on the part of the person who sees a “change” in his or her mate, an emotional withdrawal to prevent one’s self from being hurt by the dissolution of relationships which seems inevitable.

“Isn’t it great that we can get together, we can be together and just… meld?”

Which is all well and good, but it doesn’t explain the fetus-like, adult-sized body covered with fibers discovered at the mud baths run by Matthew’s other friends, Jack and Nancy (Jeff Goldblum and Veronica Cartwright)…

I don’t think I need to be too careful of spoilers when describing this movie, nor do I think I need to summarize the plot fully, because anyone who isn’t familiar with this movie should be ashamed enough not to complain and admit it. But rather than simply check off the plot points, we have to ask: What makes this movie so effective, compared to the schlocky also-rans that mine the same story concepts (like Seedpeople(1992))?

There are some nods to what formed the social background for the original; Kibner, after he’s been revealed as a pod person, calmly tells Matthew and Elizabeth, “You’ll be born again into an untroubled world — free of anxiety, fear, hate…” but he follows it up by commenting that this “superior lifeform” also has no need for love, making the whole description sound like the hyperbolic warnings against the spiritually-deadening dangers of Communism two decades earlier.

“Naked and fuzzy came I out of my mother’s womb, and naked and fuzzy shall I return thither…”

But this is not the idyllic homogeneous small town setting of the original, where something is subverting Our Town. This is San Francisco, post-Sexual Revolution, and our first real clue to the flavor of the theme informing this version comes in our first scene of Elizabeth and Geoffrey, in which he sits in his easy chair, watching the basketball game with his full-ear headphones on (he even tries to kiss Elizabeth hello without turning his attention from the game). The theme? Urban isolation — the idea that, even though you’re rarely more than twelve feet from another individual, do you really know who you’ve shacked up with? Who you’ve married? There’s an anonymity in the city’s masses, there’s an impermanence to the casual relationships between people always in motion, and even though the city dweller tries to construct a social support network to normalize their relationships, such constructs are fragile against the sheer mass of the urban population. As Elizabeth says after her day following Geoffrey, “Yesterday, it all seemed normal. Today everything seemed the same, but it wasn’t.”

Of course, the movie wouldn’t be successful if it were all ruminations on the emotional isolation of the modern urban dweller; there are also those gooey scenes of partly-formed doppelgangers spewing out of gigantic pods, fibrous and slimy, and few things top Donald Sutherland taking a garden hoe to the head of his own almost-complete pod double. As with the original, it’s a combination of sci-fi suspense and social-emotional insecurities that make it riveting viewing.

What should also be noted it how… mature the film seems, when compared with the standard Hollywood studio fare today, and especially with the forgettable “reimaginings” of classic and not-so-classic fare that fill the multiplexes out of desperation. Once upon a time, Hollywood made good movies for grown-ups, now, not so much. (My apologies for not comparing this version with either of the later two remakes, 1993′s Body Snatchers and 2007′s The Invasion, as I’ve seen neither.)

Beakers? Of colored liquids?? But that must mean — there’s SCIENCE going on here!

In fact, I could close this review with an extended analogy comparing the reimagined, soulless Hollywood product of today with the pod people… but nah.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count (counting only those who we saw as real live people before they were duplicated and replaced): 7, plus 1 dog
• breasts: 2
• mud-covered male butts: 1
• explosions: 24
• ominous thunderstorms: 0
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 1
  • Leonard Nimoy, obviously