The Invasion is a Sci-Fi-thriller film directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel released in 2007 starring Nicole Kidman as Carol Bennell and Daniel Craig as Ben Driscoll. It is inspired by 1956 film Invasion of the Body Snatchers. It did not receive good ratings on IMDb and rotten tomatoes however I quite enjoyed this film. A space shuttle crashes on Earth. The remaining parts of the space shuttle are scattered widely into a large area and those parts contained some kind of organisms. Physical contact with those mucus like organisms result in an infection in human bodies and once they are infected, they are being controlled by those organisms.

Tucker, who is the Centers for Disease director and ex husband of Carol, is one of the first people to get infected. Suddenly he wants to spend some time with his son after he gets infected. Carol hesitates but still lets her son stay at his dad’s for a couple of days. Tucker’s intention is to infect his son not to spend quality time with him. Tucker comes up with a smart idea. He uses his position as the CDC director to produce a vaccination for a so called “flu virus” but the vaccine contains the actual alien virus. This makes it possible for virus to spread over quickly and takeover the humanity.

Nicole Kidman is known as a cold actress. She is great at not showing emotions therefore it seems a little off when she is stuck in a world that almost everyone is emotionless and she is the only person who can show emotion. She did an extraordinary job at playing Carol however she could definitely pull off playing an emotionless alien.

In The Invasion, the references about the Iraq war was everywhere. It was impossible not to notice. In 2007, when the film was released Iraq war was still going on therefore those political references would seem relevant to the audience as they are used to hear about the Iraq war in their everyday lives. The film suggests that, humans are the reason of the war and everything would have been better if we had no emotions at all. In this scene above, Carol realises Ben is infected as well and he asks her if she has seen the tv or read the newspaper. He then tells her they are offering a world without war (implying the Iraq war), poverty, murder and rape. In their world there is no other, there is no hate. At this point audience is left to question which side they should be on. Should they be on aliens side? who are offering a world with no war. That means no more death and suffering in Iraq. Even Carol seemed like she would let them take her for a few seconds only if her son was not immune and if they could have a place for him in their world as well but her motherly love and instincts are bigger than her wish for a peaceful world therefore she shoots all of them and does everything to save her child.

At the end of the film, a cure for the alien virus is found and a reporter asks Dr. Galeano if all of this was over. His answer was “pick up a newspaper, for better or worse we are human again”. Then Ben reads a newspaper title “83 more deaths in Baghdad” and Carol recalls the time when the Russian ambassador said to her that the only way to imagine a world where the news are not full of violence is when humans ceased to exist. She stopped for a second and thought about it and she seemed like she even thought if everything would have been better off if they just did not cure the alien virus. These references imply that the war was actually over when people were controlled by the alien virus and sparked back again after the rebirth of humanity. The clear message of the film is quite pessimistic. As long as we have consciousness and emotions, we are doomed to hurt each other. The only way to have a world where people spread love instead of hate is to have a world without humanity.

personal rating: 8/10