The Invasion
Jonah Goldberg
The Corner
I've been meaning to throw this out there for a while now, but I haven't had a chance. I watched 'The Invasion' the other night on pay-per-view [Technically, I need to offer a spoiler warning here, so: you're warned].
I half-expected to hate it, but I'm a fan of the three earlier Body Snatcher movies and I wanted to see what they'd do. The first 'Invasion of the Body Snatchers' was famously a commentary on the Cold War. Though what the commentary was is hotly debated. I've often heard people say it's an attack on McCarthyism, but I always thought the lesson of the movie is quite the opposite. After all, the supposedly paranoid fears of a conspiracy-from-within are in fact justified. If it's about witch-hunts, there are witches. (I see from Wikipedia, meanwhile, that the author of the original book may not have had a political message in mind at all).
Anyway, I figured the 2007 remake would try to conjure some anti-Bush or anti-war themes (if memory serves the movie was actually filmed a couple years earlier). I was right. For most of the movie, it seems like it's about the Iraq war. At least the war is constantly being referenced in the background. For most of the movie I surmised that they were trying to make some sort of point about how sleeping (when the pods take over) is the moral equivalent of political apathy. If you close your eyes, oppression and conformity win, or something like that. But then, at the end of the movie, the moral of the story seems to be turned completely on its head. Earlier in the movie some Russian diplomat gives a speech about how if we lived in a world without conflict and war we would be in a world where we cease to be human. This little speech is recalled at the end, and the lessen seems (again I say "seems" because I'm not sure the filmmakers really knew what they wanted to say) to be that we should make peace with the fact that there is war and conflict in the world because that is the nature of humanity itself and it's better to stay human than surrender to a new order of eternal peace and unity if it would cost us our souls.*
I'm not sure that even I — crooked-timber-of-humanity voluptuary that I am — think that's exactly the best or most persuasive argument. After all, it's sort of a false choice, right? I mean, yes, if our options are more Iraq wars or having our souls hoovered out of us for all eternity by anima-sucking space ferns, I vote for more Iraq wars. But, that's not exactly the only option on the menu, right?
Anyway, the movie moved along much better than I would have thought and it's sort of worth watching (though perhaps not on pay-per-view). But conceptually it was a big mess — and yet that kind of made it much more interesting.
*Yes, it's pretty much exactly the same lesson of the Jasime storyline in the "Angel" series.
corner.nationalreview.com
03/06 09:40 AM |
