Movie Review


Film Title: The Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)


Genre: Horror / Sci-Fi / Thriller


Director:


Two Most Important Member of the Cast:   (Dr. Miles J. Bennell) and  (Becky Driscoll)


Review:


            [1]The Invasion of the Body Snatchers stars by  and directed by  is a 1956 science fiction film which is based on The Body Snatchers’ novel by Jack Finney. Aside from being remade two times, the United States National Film Registry selected it for preservation. ( 2006)


            The fictional town of Santa Mira is the setting of the film. The story is about the local doctor, Dr. Miles Bennell (). He finds a hives of patients condemning that their love ones are impostors. On one hand, Becky Driscoll (), a recent divorcee told him that her cousin has also this identical extraordinary fear.


             Bennell discovers with the help of his friend Jack Belicec (King Donovan) that the townspeople are really being replaced by imitations from plantlike pods, even if assured by Dr. Dan Kaufman (Larry Gates), the town psychiatrist, that the cases are nothing but an epidemic mass hysteria.


            These pods that murder and dispose their victims completely duplicates physically human. Except for their sheer lack of emotion, the pod people are the same from normal people. In order to substitute the entire human race, pods people work together to furtively spread more pods which grew from seeds wandering through space for years.


            In my opinion, Invasion of the Body Snatchers is the most brilliant and terrifying sci-fi film genre ever produced in the 1950s. It looks back and draws from the physical and photographic style of noir in its creation of shadowy tension and paranoid uncertainty. Similarly, the fear of night is used by the film than any other horror films ever made. This is interesting because instead of the day and reason, irrationality and night is sided by the film. Certainly, what makes much more sense in terms of dream logic than rational storytelling is the running of Kevin McCarthy crying for help but is ignored by the passing cars. In the same way, his leaping onto the back of a truck where he finds filled with pods also makes such sense.


            [2]In essence, Invasion of the Body Snatchers is one of the simplest alien invasion movies ever made. The aliens, firstly, replicate the human form; the premise doesn’t warrant ghastly figures of elaborate design. Foremost, as stated in many reviews of the film, Invasion of the Body Snatchers is less concerned with alien presence than it is with alienation. ( 2004)


            Literally, aliens are the conspiring force, though the film can be seen, rather obviously, as political allegory. Further securing this claim is the studio imposed opening and epilogue, involving Miles fleeing to a hospital emergency room and attempting to convince skeptics of his radical knowledge. This sequence employs an illogical and contextually unrealistic happy ending and dumbs the intensifying thematic trajectory of the film.


            [3]On one hand, the film’s interpretation being an allegory about Communism and the McCarthy witch-hunts of the 1950s is the perpetual issue that will forever dog Invasion of the Body Snatchers until probably the film becomes outdated. If Donald Siegel’s intention is really to make an anti-Communist allegory, then it is questionable (1999).  However, in my view, it is too literal if we called the film as a Communist allegory. Conversely, we could interpret it as a parable against conformity equally as much as a parable about communism.


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 



Credit:ivythesis.typepad.com


0 comments:

Post a Comment

 
Top