Out of Body Experience

I think one of the reasons I haven't watched at least some of the "classic" movies I've never seen is because their endings are so famous. Sure, there's more to most stories than mere surprise, but if a movie is famous for a big twist at the end -- and that big twist is widely known -- you have to ask whether there's anything else there worth your time.

I recently took a chance on such a movie: the 1978 version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The story of alien "pod people" slowly replacing all the humans in San Francisco is widely known for its atmosphere of paranoia... and its final scene involving Donald Sutherland. Is there anything else there worth your time?

In my opinion, not much. There is an intriguing cast here. Donald Sutherland is wielding his full gravitas to make the movie seem serious. Veronica Cartwright is playing the same sort of shrieking basket case she'd play to great effect one year later in Alien. Jeff Goldblum is here in one of his earliest roles -- and already "Goldbluming" all over the place. Leonard Nimoy is cast in a conscious tweaking of his famous role as Spock, here playing a psychologist trying to rein in everyone's wild emotions.

But the good cast doesn't make for a particularly engaging story. In the way of many 1970s movies, Invasion of the Body Snatchers is slowly paced. But unlike, say, Halloween, this slow buildup doesn't do a particularly good job of ratcheting up tension. It's more an extended exercise in strangeness. Things are weird in this movie before and independent of the invading alien doppelgangers. There's a scene in which the main character spends a good deal of time telling the setup to a joke... only to be interrupted and never deliver the punch line. Character relationships seem strained and odd above and beyond the intended atmosphere of paranoia. What exactly is the connection between Sutherland's character and Nimoy's? Why is there such a rivalry between Nimoy's character and Goldblum's? Why is Nimoy wearing a weird leather (driving?) glove for the whole movie?

For the languid pace the movie sets most of the time, it's frustrating how the plot suddenly advances through implausible leaps in logic. Why does some random guy in the street know who "they" are and that "they're coming"? How does Cartwright's character reach the insight that they're up against aliens? Or that they can be fooled by hiding your emotions? There are a lot of dots left unconnected by the movie, logic abandoned in favor of atmosphere. And yet that atmosphere isn't entirely effective in my view. The movie isn't tense when it's meant to be tense, and isn't scary when characters react as though they're scared.

The one element I can praise without reservation is the design of the creatures. There's a lot of great gross-out effects used to bring them to life, and excellent sound design by the always-wonderful Ben Burtt. But pretty much everything else in the movie left me cold.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers may be considered a sci-fi classic (in both this version and the original), but I found it a boring watch. I give the movie a D+. It was my time that was truly snatched.