A space shuttle crashes to earth, leaving bits of it's alien-contaminated wreckage across the land. The infection spreads quickly, taking a person over while they sleep. By the time people really start to notice they're in the extreme minority, but a few people seem to be immune to the life form that now rules the world.

If you have a little kid and think they'd love to see a flick where aliens quietly and quickly take over the world, The Invasion would be perfect for you, but if you're just looking for a great flick that shares the exact same description, go pick up Invasion of the Body Snatchers and see it the way it should be seen.

Basically what we've got here is a remake in the vein of Dawn of the Dead, meaning same setting, all new plot. If that were that, it'd be great, and for a while there I thought it might be. Nope, this one was Holliwoodified. That means they cut all the good parts so they get a PG rating, then they give the whole thing a double-coat of cheery-happy-stupid, then they invite us to enjoy this new and improved, synthetic film they've replaced an actual great film with.

It's not a bad flick. The people who've been replaced are really quite menacing and the changes they made to the science of it all were pretty cool. From there on it's really just a suspense flick, Kidman hiding in nooks and crannies, a few car chases and we're done.

And by done, I mean one of the coolest endings of any movie ever is replaced with a pile of shit that completely ruins it. I won't say I hate the movie, up until that point it was pretty decent, but I'll never watch it again.

I was really excited about this flick, and anyone familiar with my reviews knows I'm not one of the many that like to bash anything new or remade, I walk in with an open mind and honestly want to love every movie I see. Sometimes you really can't, though. To compare this to the 1978 version is just insulting. This is the fourth time Jack Finney's story has been turned into a film, and this is the only time I really disliked it.

The characters were likeable, but again, the characters in Invasion of the Body Snatchers were actually deep, interesting and believable, something we're getting less and less of lately. Instead of a frustrated, envious poet who's wife runs a mudbath, we're given a doctor. Instead of a hopelessly romantic health inspector who's in love with another man's wife, we're given a psychiatrist. There's no descriptors for them at all, it's a psychiatrist who loves her son and doesn't love her best friend, and that's really all there is to her. You could stick her in thirty other movies that were released in the last five years and she'd fit just fine. They're all interchangeable, all the pegs are the same shape now because we don't have the attention span to see any character development, let alone a little depth.

Like I said, if you're looking to start your chickenshit kid on some scifi-horror and want to make sure he sleeps well despite it, grab this. If you want a good movie, grab the '78 version and see what a masterpiece this crapioca pudding could have been.

3 out of 10 movies without anything interesting enough to make a stupid joke about