Civilisation crumbles in The Invasion

time period will markedly affect the viewer’s reaction as well as the film’s credibility.
Based on a science fiction novel Body Snatchers by Jack Finney, which caused a great stir upon its publication in the relatively innocent 1990s, it once again visits a theme, which has fascinated moviegoers for a long time.
What if, it asks us to consider, the enemy, which ultimately attacks and lays waste the Earth has absolutely none of the characteristics we have always assumed and have been for generations, preparing against.
In the case of this film it is also not incidental that the two leading characters have taken on roles which most moviegoers will find alien to their natures, and certainly alien to our past experience of them.
In The Invasion, Nicole Kidman, now moving into her 40s, retains the pretty face we have always associated with her, but moves on from there in her portrayal of a psychiatrist and a mother.
As a mother Kidman (as Dr Carol Pinnel) is in the very unenviable position that she is not only separated and divorced from the 8 year old boy’s father, but looks upon him as a potential life threat to herself and their child.
As a psychiatrist she has both a maternal and professional reaction when it is revealed that it is her child who, inexplicably, bears the immunity to the virus which is lethally descending upon the world entire.
Intent on protecting her child against the ravages which medical experimentation would bring, she is at first aided, and then betrayed, by the character (Ben Driscoll) played by Daniel Craig, long and lamentably absent from the screen.
As a reviewer of the film I ask myself whether it should be considered the shortcoming of the film’s makers or of the times in which they were living, that they reveal the rest of the world inattentive to the impending threat.
The film, set in Washington D.C, America’s capital under the administration of the former president George W Bush, is unclear in depicting the attitude not only of the world out there, but of the rest of America itself. As a sci-fi film it leaves the viewer with more questions than he had when he entered the cinema. If you are of a mind that that is a good thing, you will applaud The Invasion.