San Francisco, 1970s. After a heavy downpour, mysterious flowers bloom throughout the city. Biologist Elizabeth Driscoll brings one of them home. And soon she notices that her friend Jeffrey is behaving strangely. Elizabeth turns to her friend Matthew Bannell for advice, and is surprised to learn that she is not the only one facing such a problem. It seems that a lot of people in the city are beginning to do things that are unusual for them.
4k movies reviews
It is often said that Hollywood is currently experiencing a crisis of ideas, which is reflected in the sheer number of sequels / prequels / remakes that have literally flooded our screens. However, this has been practiced before – many, now considered classics, films of the 70s – 80s are remakes / screen adaptations of films that were released in the 30-50s (for example, Something and Scarface). Philip Kaufman’s film Invasion of the Body Snatchers, which was released 22 years after the film of the same name, now considered a science fiction classic, falls into this category. Technically speaking, Kaufman’s picture cannot be called a 100% remake, since both films were adaptations of Jack Finney’s novel Body Thieves, published in 1955.
Director Philip Kaufman faced the same difficulties that current directors experience when reproducing recognized classics – how to tell the viewer the same story in a new way, while not falling into blind copying of the original, but on the other hand and not going too far with innovation? Few people managed to fully cope with this problem, and therefore it is all the more interesting to watch this film, because its creators managed to solve this problem.
The scenario of the Invasion, although it repeats a number of moves of the 1956 film, is on the whole quite original and in fact continues the story told in the previous film, but already in a big city. If the action of the previous version was set in a small town, then the action in the new version was moved to San Francisco.
By transferring the action to the metropolis, Kaufman managed to significantly raise the level of fear and paranoia – after all, if in the previous film the heroes hoped to get to the big city, civilization in order to warn the authorities, then there is nowhere to run – the huge city turns into a giant trap, from which it is impossible to get out and where there is nowhere to wait for help, and the developed infrastructure allows you to start growing and distributing copies of people around the world on a truly industrial scale.
There are also references to the original tape, so its director Don Siegel got the role of a taxi driver, and the leading actor Kevin McCarthy actually repeated the famous scene from the end of the 1956 film, giving a kind of hello to all those who wanted to know if his hero managed to warn the authorities about impending disaster.
As mentioned above, Kaufman’s creation is significantly more depressing and frightening than its predecessor – in fact, it is the darkest film of all four film adaptations available at the moment. The increase in budget and progress in technologies for creating special effects allowed us to show the process of “replacement” of people in all its glory, which only increases the tension, in addition, there is one rather unexpected and therefore more frightening moment when we see the result of an unsuccessful copy of one of the characters. In addition, unlike the previous version, Kaufman’s film has a very effective and memorable ending – it is cruel, uncompromising and leaves little doubt in the audience.
In addition to directing and cinematography, Invasion of the Body Snatchers of 1978 boasts a good cast. Donald Sutherland and Brooke Adams played the main roles of Sanitary Inspector Matthew Bennel and his colleague Elizabeth Driscoll. Of course, comparisons with the brilliant duo McCarthy-Winter from the original film are inevitable, and personally I think that Sutherland and Adams did very well in their roles, giving their characters depth, and the lines of their relationship of drama (especially since the history and characters of their characters are quite different from the 1956 film).
The secondary characters also turned out to be very successful – and the slightly eccentric writer Jack Belichek (Jeff Goldblum), and his wife Nancy (Veronica Cartwright), and Dr. Kibner (Leonard Nimoy).
Info Blu-ray
Video
Codec: HEVC / H.265 (84.9 Mb/s)
Resolution: Native 4K (2160p)
HDR: Dolby Vision, HDR10
Aspect ratio: 1.85:1
Original aspect ratio: 1.85:1
Audio
English: DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 (48kHz, 24-bit)
English: DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 (48kHz, 24-bit)
English: Dolby Digital 5.1
Subtitles
English SDH.
