Invasion of the Body Snatchers

Easily among the greatest remakes ever made, Philip Kaufman updates Don Siegel's McCarthy-era classic to 1978 San Francisco. Kaufman proves singularly adept at keeping multiple genres and tones in play, from noirish mystery to heady paranormal thriller to face-squishing sci-fi horror. There's truly no recovering from the film's final the enemy-is-us parting shot. Read full review

Undiluted pleasure and excitement. The scriptwriter, W.D. Richter, supplies some funny lines, and the director, Phil Kaufman, provides such confident professionalism that you sit back in the assurance that every spooky nuance you're catching is just what was intended.

Set at the intersection of post-Vietnam paranoia and the myopic introspection that became hippiedom's most lasting cultural contribution, the Philip Kaufman-directed Invasion alternates social commentary with impeccably crafted scares. As much an echo of Don Siegel's 1956 original as a remake, it does little to change a formula that worked fine the first time around. Read full review

Invasion of the Body Snatchers validates the entire concept of remakes. 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. Sutherland has his best role since Klute. He gets excellent support from Adams, who projects a touching vulnerability. Read full review

One of the subtlest and most extraordinarily fluid of American horror films, Kaufman crafts textured scenes, rich in emotional and object-centric tactility, that cause our heads to casually spin with expectation and dread. Read full review

Though it lacks the awesome allegorical ambiguousness of the 1956 classic of sci-fi/political paranoia (here paid homage in cameo appearances by Kevin McCarthy and Don Siegel), Kaufman and screenwriter WD Richter's update and San Francisco transposition of Jack Finney's novel is a far from redundant remake. Read full review

For once, a great remake, smartly executed. Great performances and a killing ending that will stay with you forever can't hurt, either. Read full review

An unusually imaginative and adroit but also self-conscious remake, which transposes the setting from a disarmingly serene small town called Santa Mira to a systematically ominous, threatening San Francisco. Read full review

Director Philip Kaufman and producer Robert Solo cleverly entwine such elements as disorienting low-angle shots, an ominously pulsating soundtrack and eerie gloom with the tried-and-true plot and come up with a tight thriller. [29 Dec 1978, p.20]

Phil Kaufman's version of the Don Siegel SF classic is good as remakes go, but not as good as the original. Where Siegel was swift, compact, and efficient Kaufman tends to be slow, garrulous, and needlessly baroque. Ideas that Siegel knocked off in a few shots are expanded to fill entire sequences—but they're good ideas, and can stand a little stretching. Good allegories never die; they just expand and contract to fit the times. Read full review

There's not much depth to the charaterizations, but they're uncommonly vivid for a horror movie. You believe that these wildly disparate people are friends, and the growing sexual affection between Sutherland and Adams is conveyed with a nice, understated warmth. [18 Dec 1978, p.85]

The re-make, directed by Philip Kaufman, has lost its intellectual innocence and throws in everything from Chariots of the Gods to recombinant DNA - it's as clever and hip as a New Times investigative piece. Paradoxically, by being so smart, the re-make seems a bit dumber than the original. But it's dumb in a nice way. [22 Dec 1978]

The screenplay, by W. D. Richter, remains bright and lively throughout, but the plot just isn't full enough to carry a feature film. The characters are vivid, and uniformly well-played, and their pre-pod lives are fairly well established. But an hour into the film, once the menace is identified, the few remaining humans begin fleeing for their lives, and after that it's just run, run, run. Read full review

If there is a hero in the new film, it is Donald Sutherland, who gives an energetic, intelligent, emotionally rangy performance as the public health officer working on the case. There is nothing wrong, either, with Brooke Adams as his colleague and lover. But, sadly, they can not compensate for all the other mistakes in a film that lingers too long and too soberly over material that, as the original showed, must be quickly, even superficially handled, if it is to be accepted at all. Read full review

The film collapses midway--because of unsure and sloppy direction, splintered story continuity, and the overacting of Adams, Cartwright, and others. The battle between Sutherland and the aliens in the "pod factory" at the end is simply absurd and sophomoric. Read full review