Body snatchers' latest incarnation

It looks like we're awash in pod people again.

This time it's courtesy of Oliver Hirschbiegel's explosive - albeit unsuccessful - new thriller, The Invasion, which opened Friday, the latest adaptation of Jack Finney's sci-fi novel The Body Snatchers.

That would be pod people as in, "Dude, the school's been taken over by the pod people!" the standard epithet that misfits have regularly, if vainly, hurled at the popular kids for decades.

Pod people! It's a term to fall in love with. A superbly rich, over-determined concept that the language contracted from pop culture when Finney first published his serialized novel in Colliers magazine in late 1954.

For the uninitiated, pod people are the folks we hate but secretly also envy, because they conform to the status quo sans question. Like Aldous Huxley's Soma-addicted citizens in Brave New World or Jim Jones' spaced-out cult followers, they're the bovine masses, the "Shiny Happy People" Michael Stipe sings about with such resigned joy in the R.E.M. song, "Everyone around love them, love them . . ."

Finney's rather modest story has hit such a powerful cultural nerve that, counting

Invasion

, it has spawned four very different major films. (Four is a low count: There are numerous similarly

themed films, notably

The Faculty

, Robert Rodriguez's mordant 1998 deconstruction of the body-snatcher idea.)

The various Invasions touch on universal themes, including fear of losing self-identity to the crowd and anxiety about the precarious balance between reason and our destructive passions.

But like other successful sci-fi films, each also serves to illustrate social, political and scientific anxieties of its time.

In the 1950s, the fear was communism; in the 1970s, conformity; in the 1990s, AIDS. And today?

The popularity of the

Invasion

theme is mostly due to Don Siegel's ingenious 1956 sleeper hit,

Invasion of the Body Snatchers

. Planned as a minor B-movie, the $417,000 production featured some remarkable talents, including director Don Siegel, who'd go on to make

The Killers

and

Dirty Harry

; star Kevin McCarthy, a stage-trained character actor who earned an Oscar nod for

Death of a Salesman

in 1951; and a young Sam Peckinpah, who contributed to the script and appeared - sporting a creepy pencil mustache - in a bit part.

Made at the height of the postwar economic boom, Siegel's film is set in an idyllic suburban town in California, where the ho-hum life of country doc Miles Bennell (McCarthy) is interrupted when more and more people insist that their loved ones have somehow changed.

The film dramatizes the Faustian bargain that defined American life at the time: Give up all signs of your individuality, become xenophobic conformists, and you'll achieve the American dream of endless prosperity.

Like novelist Ayn Rand, it mounts a powerful assault on the idea of conformity and collectivism. Is it a condemnation of the Soviet Union? Or are Siegel & Co. - some of whose colleagues were blacklisted - attacking the anticommunist McCarthy crowd, which was no less an enemy of individual creative freedom?

Philip Kaufman's literate 1978 version is arguably the best of the bunch. Starring Donald Sutherland, Brooke Adams, Jeff Goldblum and Leonard Nimoy, it was made in the wake of the Watergate scandal and is set, significantly, in San Francisco, once the world capital of hippiedom.

The film presents the tension of the individual vs. the masses with an intense suspicion of the establishment.

But as Nimoy's hippie-theorist character makes clear, the film's central preoccupation is alienation. A psychiatrist, David Kibner seems to be some sort of Jungian dying to plug back into the source of all life - the collective unconscious.

He preaches the basic New Age gospel: that modern alienation can only be overcome by transcendent contact with nature and other people.

Ironically, that seems to be exactly what Kibner finds when he's reborn as a pod person. He's elated (as much as a pod person can be) and is the one who makes the "being a pod person is awesome" speech standard to all the movies. He says that when he said yes to the pod, all his doubts, fears, and aggression melted away. Of course, so did his capacity for love and compassion. He's like a worker bee hooked up to the hive, having no individuality, but also no problems.

In 1993, director Abel Ferrara followed up his celebrated picture

Bad Lieutenant

with

Body Snatchers

, starring Gabrielle Anwar, Forest Whitaker and Meg Tilly. The indie-film bad boy added more sex and violence, and gave his film a creepy, post-

Alien

horror edge, to great effect.

Steve Malone (Terry Kinney) is an EPA scientist who has moved to a strangely suburban-looking Army base to search for toxic contamination, possibly leaked from weapons of mass destruction.

The film is set at the end of the Cold War, which, conservative thinker Francis Fukuyama said at the time, marked the end of all Western history, because history's central quest - to democratize the world - had been achieved.

It's the end of the world all right: The film's teen hero, Marti (Anwar), and her boyfriend, Tim, have quite an infestation raining upon them. The virus is made up of rain-forest-destroying contaminants, but that's not all they've got to deal with: There's American militarism and post-Cold War triumphalism and, significantly, the specter of AIDS.

In comparison, the latest incarnation, Hirschbiegel's

Invasion

, is a disappointment. The flick, which stars Nicole Kidman as D.C. psychiatrist and Daniel Craig as her genius-doctor boyfriend, is not actually about pod people. There's nary a pod in the film.

The enemy in Invasion is some kind of spore-virus combo, which, as a scientist explains, gets inside your genes and reprograms them - but only during REM sleep, which is why you mustn't ever fall asleep.

This time the filmmakers spend so much time on the fake science-babble that we miss the point altogether.

What made the first two films so unique and mind-blowing, and the third so delectably creepy, was that unlike most run-of-the-mill sci-fi fare, they eschewed tech talk and instead focused on the characters' relationships with one another and the larger community. And the social criticism made the movies that much more enjoyable.

But there's hope: Variety says the film was recut by the studio and that the German director's intended version (on DVD soon enough) is a far more intricate, nuanced piece. It'll be fascinating to see. It'll likely expand upon what the film identifies as the newest soul-crushing invader: the mass media.