Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978)
Review of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978), directed by Philip Kaufman
Is it terrible that I hadn’t watched this movie until 2021? Invasion of the Body Snatchers has become such a sci-fi / horror slash that is a staple for what is now quote-on-quote nostalgia cinema for so many Americans. I wouldn’t call the 1978 version a classic yet, but the 1956 version would probably be considered one.
I’ll probably watch the 1956 one sometime because I’ve read that it’s film in a film noir style, which fits the overall arching tone of the movie so well. I found that this version, the 1978 one, lacked something that I couldn’t quite place my finger on.
Anyways, I finally sat down to watch this and used up one of my Kanopy credits. I’ve really taken Kanopy for granted nowadays, especially after gaining my Criterion account, but it’s a free service from my library so it’s the perfect excuse to watch movies. I just don’t use it enough. On a rainy autumn Tuesday I went into this movie with zero expectations and came out with so many more questions than answers. Let’s dive into this review, shall we?
In this remake of a novel and 1956 movie, an alien invasion has begun to replace all the humans in San Francisco.
The scene is San Francisco and our female protagonist, Elizabeth, has begun to become unhappy. Her boyfriend Geoffrey is acting strange after she brought home a strange pink flower she’d plucked. While one night he goes to bed with his usual personality, the next morning it seems like he’s been replaced with a compeltely different person.
She doesn’t understand this at first, but us, the audience, know the context immediately. Geoffrey has been replaced with an alien who’s created a duplicate of his body. When a human has a duplicate made, the original person disintegrates into dust. It’s pretty wild and kind of sad, like an advanced form of decomposition.
Elizabeth, however, is quite confused and goes to her coworker Matthew. Let’s put air-quotes around the word coworker because these two seem a little cozy to be considered normal coworkers.
There’s a lot of strange romantic undertones around this, especially because half of the movie they’re running away from these aliens who want to take their bodies and forms, but it’s there. We can’t deny that.
Anyways, Matthew tells her to go to his psychologist friend’s book launch but the only tidbit of wisdom is that he thinks that Elizabeth just wants to break up with Matthew.
Getting some feminist undertones in my thinking here because Elizabeth is one of the first to notice something is wrong here, which then plays into the depiction of her by the men around her, particularly David here, as crazy and wanting out of the relationship. Like so many other women, she isn’t taken seriously in her concerns here.
The plot thickens when their friends Jack and Nancy discover a duplicate body of Jack forming in their mud baths. While Elizabeth is sleeping at her house, Matthew notices how a duplicate of her is forming in her garden, then destroys it.
This then leads them to the conclusion that this process created by the aliens only occurs when one is asleep, and, once the body is finished morphing, the human who has been duplicated quite literally falls away and into dust.
The four of them, merged with the heroic psychologist David, team up together to try survive this apocalyptic scenario. And what’s ironic about this movie is that while we have hope for our heroes, not one of them survives.
There is no hope in this world because once you are asleep, a copy of you is molded into something the aliens want and then you’re gone. I found this to be quite poetic from an analysis lens of our current society—who is truly awake and asleep? Who has been molded to become something quite unfamiliar to the people around them?
This movie does a really good job of slowly getting under your skin with the visuals. While the aliens appear like their normal human counterparts once they’ve assimilated to life on art, it’s how they’re created that gives you the creeps on the screen. The pod in the mud bath and in the garden are quite disturbing to look at and are quite realistic for the time this movie was made in (1978).
There wasn’t as much CGI to play around with here compared to the movies we’re watching now. Then when Elizabeth literally falls apart in Matthew’s arms—that was sad but also kind of like wow, that just happened. It’s the only time in the movie we actually see that process so it comes across as much more shocking.
My inner feminist finds that scene more interesting too. The only people we see that have a direct fate implied are Nancy, Elizabeth, and the man who was screaming about the aliens and was run over by a car to be silenced. Two of those three are women.
My first thought and analysis when it comes to this is that the women in the film are depicted as being condemned specifically because, well, they’re women. People tend to get more upset when a woman is murdered, and for a 1978 film, we need to see our male character let out his rage at losing the leading lady.
Overall Thoughts
I wasn’t as interested in this film because of the plot at the end of the day, but because of the questions it raised. I wanted to dig deeper into how this film plays into stereotypical gender roles (Nancy running a mud bath and salon while tending to male customers, Elizabeth being one of the few women in her lab) and the male savior tropes.
I also just wanted to know more about these aliens coming onto Earth. I’d assume the novel version of this movie would give more context to that, as we can only fit so much plot into a movie’s run time, but I wanted to know so much more about them as a species.
Like we know they’re leaving a dying planet, but is their form of adapting and taking the bodies because they’re incapable of living on this planet in their natural form? Do they just do this throughout their species’ history in general? I have too many questions left.
