Invasion of the Body Snatchers is a 1978 American science-fiction horror film directed by Philip Kaufman, written by W. D. Richter, and starring Donald Sutherland, Brooke Adams, Veronica Cartwright, Jeff Goldblum, and Leonard Nimoy.
[1] An amorphous parasitic alien race abandons its dying planet and travels to Earth, taking the form of small seed pods with pink flowers upon settling.
Elizabeth Driscoll, a laboratory scientist at the San Francisco Health Department, brings one of the flowers home, and shows it to her boyfriend, Geoffrey.
She awakens the next morning to find him being cold and distant while putting debris of the glass that once held the flower pod into a garbage truck.
Jack and Kibner's duplicates ambush and inject them with sedatives, needing the victims to fall asleep to be fully replaced.
Noticing a nearby ship, Matthew briefly leaves Elizabeth - whose ankle is sprained - to investigate, only to find it being loaded with pods.
Horrified and enraged, Matthew flees the duplicate, breaks into the dock warehouse, and burns down the building, destroying several plants and killing many pod people.
"[2] Cinematographer Michael Chapman worked with Kaufman to try to capture the film noir feel of the original in color, reviewing some classics of that genre before production.
Among them are the grinding noises of garbage trucks, a common urban sound that slowly becomes horrific as it becomes clear that most of what they are processing is the discarded husks that remain of pre-pod human bodies.
Burtt also designed the shriek when pod people see a surviving human, a sound Kaufman said was composed of many elements, including a pig's squeal.
"I found some viscous material in an art store, I think we paid $12 for a big vat of it, and then [we dropped it] into solutions and reversed the film", Kaufman recalled.
Miles Bennell in the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers, makes a brief appearance as an old man frantically screaming "They're coming!"
While they were filming the scene, in the Tenderloin, Kaufman recalls that a naked man lying on the street awoke and recognized McCarthy.
"[2] The original film's director, Don Siegel, appears as a taxi driver who alerts the police to Matthew and Elizabeth's attempt to flee the city.
His wife, Rose Kaufman, has a small role at the book party as the woman who argues with Jeff Goldblum's character.
This new version of Don Siegel's 1956 cult classic not only matches the original in horrific tone and effect, but exceeds it in both conception and execution.
Not literally a remake—it's more of a sequel, actually—this handsome, highly imaginative film generates its own implications from Finney's sturdy allegory of dehumanization and manages even to have some fun in the process.
"[13] Roger Ebert wrote that it "was said to have something to do with Watergate and keeping tabs on those who are not like you", and called Kael's praise for the film "inexplicable",[14] while Time magazine's Richard Schickel labeled its screenplay "laughably literal".
[citation needed] Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) has been named among the greatest film remakes ever made, by several publications, including Rolling Stone.
The site's consensus reads, "Employing gritty camerawork and evocative sound effects, Invasion of the Body Snatchers is a powerful remake that expands upon themes and ideas only lightly explored in the original.
"[23] The German scholar Christian Knöppler wrote that the film was in many ways a lamentation for the end of the counterculture of the 1960s that was especially associated with San Francisco.
[24] Jack Bellicec wears a shabby U.S. Army jacket and has a deep distrust of the U.S. government, which implies that he was involved in protest movements in the past, perhaps against the Vietnam War.
[24] Knöppler wrote: "For the Bellicecs, the revelation of an inhuman, all-encompassing conspiracy that enforces mindless conformity is hardly a paradigm shift – it is the world they already live in.
The character of Geoffrey spends his free time mindlessly watching television commercials, a trait that is continued by the pod version of him.
Free of love, desire, ambition and faith", a change of emphasis that implies it is only unwanted emotions that are the issue in 1978 as compared to 1956.
[25] When the running man is killed by the pod people, Matthew and Elizabeth do not stop their car and instead drive on to Dr. Kibner's party to avoid being late, blithely trusting that the authorities will handle the incident.
[25] It is not clear if Dr. Kibner is a pod duplicate or not at this point in the film, and accordingly it is impossible to judge if this is a sincere statement or an attempt to keep Elizabeth from learning the truth.
[25] Regardless, the film does argue that a trend towards "emotional disengagement and apathy" was already prevalent in San Francisco that prefigures the state of being a pod person, who have no feelings at all.
[28] The film expresses much distrust of psychiatrists such as Kibner, who are portrayed as seeking to limit the human experiences and with promoting a deracinated consumerism.
[28] Unlike the 1956 version, where the U.S. government is presented as a benign force, which once alerted to the pod invasion, promptly takes action by organizing a quarantine of the pod-infested small town of Santa Mira (though this happy ending was added at the insistence of the studio), the government is presented as a far more sinister and malign force in the 1978 version.