DVD review (region 1)
Directed by Philip Kaufman
Starring Donald Sutherland, Brooke Adams, Jeff Goldblum, Leonard Nimoy, Veronica Cartwright, Art Hindle
Release date Out now

San Francisco, 1978. People are being replaced by alien duplicates grown in pods. The only resistance comes from workers at the Department of Environmental Health!

This 1978 movie was the first of several ‘official’ remakes of the classic 1956 Invasion of the Body Snatchers (with the Nicole Kidman/Daniel Craig-starring The Invasion being the latest). Twenty-two years after Don Siegel’s first ground-breaking adaptation of Jack Finney’s novel of paranoia, writer WD Richter (Buckaroo Banzai) and director Philip Kaufman (The Right Stuff) updated the communists-as-aliens conceit and reimagined it for the new age-y 1970s ‘me’ generation.

From the imaginatively realised opening sequence of alien spores evacuating their planet and drifting to Earth, this is clearly not a Star Wars-style feel good SF movie. Instead, this is a movie packed with post-Watergate paranoia – if you can't trust the government, who can you trust?

It explores issues such as the destruction of the environment, new age psychiatry and family breakdown. Oh, and it’s also a thrilling adventure boasting some fine performances, a great script and exceptional sound design.

The film unfolds at an unhurried pace (today’s 12-year-olds might even call it slow), and features some fantastic newsreel-style shooting in San Francisco. This tale of alienation in the city is just as effective today as it was in 1978, and proves that the ideas from Finney’s novel and Don Siegel’s original movie are infinitely adaptable to suit the times (Abel Ferrera showed it again in his 1993 version, simply titled Body Snatchers).

Siegel turns up in this film in a cameo as a taxi driver, while the star of the 1956 version, Kevin McCarthy, makes an appearance reprising the climax of the original (suggesting this version is as much a sequel as a retelling). There are other oddball throwaway cameos, such as that of Robert Duvall as a priest on some children’s swings, right at the start of the film.

From Richter’s word-perfect script, through Kaufman’s spot-on direction to Ben Burtt’s innovative sound design, the movie makes the real world effectively strange, as those around the heroes succumb not so much to alien invasion/replacement or ideological change (as in the 1950s) but to simple lifestyle changes (a very 1970s concern). This movie is about conformity, about the struggle to be different or unique and how (as the climax can be read) conformity cannot be resisted.

All the key behind the scenes folk appear in the 16-minute ‘making of’ doc, including Sutherland and Cartwright from the cast, Kaufman and Richter, and cinematographer Michael Chapman. Chapman also gets a five-minute featurette to himself, as does Ben Burtt in a 12-minute exploration of the movie’s effective soundscape. There’s also a five-minute special effects feature, a trailer and an anecdote-laden commentary from Kaufman. Brian J. Robb

VERDICT: 8/10
In this case non-conformity would just be silly: become a pod person and buy it!