Invasion of the Body Snatchers

I believe there are two kinds of people in the world – those who take pleasure in being scared and those who do not. A friend of mine told me that when he was a kid, he and his buddies would sneak out at midnight, go to a nearby cemetery, and take turns hiding behind headstones while the others walked through, never sure when a hand was going to reach out and grab them unexpectedly. My friend loved it. Personally, I would rather be waterboarded. I hate that kind of stuff and so, unpopular an opinion as it is, I also really don’t like horror movies. It’s not that I’m unreasonably scared of them or can’t separate real life from the fictional world of a movie. It’s just that I don’t enjoy them, especially the gory ones. The upswing of torture porn that began in the early 2000s with movies like Saw and Hostel leaves me colder than a dismembered corpse north of the Arctic Circle. There’s a spiritual bleakness and a physical brutality in them that I find off-putting to say the least.

But it is Halloween, after all, and so I feel obligated to make a recommendation for a some kind of a scary movie, even if it’s old, black and white, and doesn’t feature anything more gory than a minor cut on a character’s hand. 1956’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers, directed by Don Siegel, still retains its punch after more than sixty years since its release. Remade, imitated, and ripped off, you’ve probably seen a dozen films inspired by it, but if you haven’t seen the original, you really should and there’s no time like the present Halloween to do it.

It stars Kevin McCarthy as the young, smart-allecky, and recently divorced Miles Bennell, a family doctor in the idyllic California town of Santa Mira. Two things happen at the outset of the film. First, Miles reconnects with his foxy and also newly divorced former sweetheart, Becky Driscoll, played by Dana Wynter. Second, people around him begin to have a curious delusion: they insist that the people in their lives, their uncle, their mother, aren’t actually them. That they have been replaced somehow by an almost but not quite exact duplicate of themselves.   

Over time, it becomes apparent that it’s no delusion but that someone or something is taking over and replacing the local sheriff, the mom next door, the school kid running down the street. Miles and Becky grow closer and closer as they try to escape the once-peaceful little town that’s now ground zero for body snatchers.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers isn’t pure horror. It’s a paranoid sci fi thriller with elements of horror, film noir, melodrama, and political allegory. It’s special effects are pretty lo fi, and as I mentioned there’s zero gore. But having said that, the paranoia is ratcheted up to eleven and the images of the entire town gathering in the square to pick up their body snatcher pods to distribute is chilling. The most intense moments of the film are when Miles discovers a duplicate body being hatched out of a pod in a green house. Twitching, foaming, and undulating, it’s a marvel of production design and cinematography. As the new body pushes and flops its way out of the pod, you’ll find it’s as creepy and unsettling a sight as you could want on Halloween.

At 80 minutes, the film has zero time for excess. It is lean and efficient as it hurtles to its end. The black and white cinematography in particular is gorgeous. The high contrast makes every shadow pitch black and every white look like a search light is pointed at it. McCarthy and Wynter’s banter is sexy and light while their sweaty-faced panic feels real and potent.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers is the perfect Halloween movie for people who want to be unsettled and thrilled without being grossed out.

Blade Runner 2049

Please be warned: there are spoilers ahead.

As the long-awaited sequel to Ridley Scott’s 1982 original, Blade Runner 2049 had a lot to live up to and huge potential for disaster. After all, when it comes to high-expectation sequels, there are very few Godfather II’s and The Empire Strikes Back but a lot of Blues Brothers 2000, if you know what I’m saying. Miraculously, under the confident, even visionary direction of Denis Villneuve and the remarkable cinematography of Roger Deakins, 2049 is a more than worthy successor to the original. It does what all the best sequels do – it builds on what made the original important and manages to broaden, deepen, and add layers to it. 

 Set thirty years after the original, the story follows K, a replicant or human-like robot played by Ryan Gosling, who is a Blade Runner, a cop who tracks down and kills fugitive replicants. On a routine assignment, K uncovers the bones of Rachel, the beautiful replicant from the original film played by Sean Young. Forensics reveal that Rachel died in childbirth. This, of course, is impossible because having been made and not born, Rachel wasn’t human and shouldn’t have been able to bear children. Thus begins the main arc of the film, the search for the missing mystery child, the chosen one, the potential replicant messiah. K is assigned by his boss to find and kill the child before news gets out and all the walls between human and human-like robot fall to pieces in war and rebellion.

Agents for the Wallace Corporation, the company that now produces replicants, follow K, hoping to capture the child and unlock the secrets of its conception so the corporation can exponentially increase its production of new robots. They can only make so many on their own, but if they can get replicants, you know, replicating in the Biblical sense, then the company’s profit margin would really soar.

Visually, the film is beautiful and bleak. As with the music and the production design, the cinematography touches on themes from the original while clearly showing the passage of time and evolution of the world of the film. Rather than Ridley Scott’s overstuffed, teeming compositons, Villneuve and Deakins work in vast, monolithic strokes, conveying an epic scope. In his search, K ends up in abandoned, post-dirty bomb Las Vegas which looks like a futuristic Valley of the Pharoahs. The camera glides over huge casino pyramids and walkways, shattered statues and plazas, everything orange, hazy, and irradiated. The effect is beautiful as well as frightening.

Of course, Harrison Ford returns as Rick Deckard, the Blade Runner who ran off with Rachel at the end of the first film and who may or may not be a replicant himself. Grizzled and sad, Deckard hides out in Las Vegas trying to avoid detection in hopes of protecting the identity of his miracle child with Rachel. As an actor, Ford’s range is limited – he’s grumpy and creaky, just like old Han Solo and old Indiana Jones. It’s interesting that in his 70s Ford is returning to the roles that made him one of the most bankable stars in the world as a young man – but that’s a whole other show.

The film in general is big – both visually and in its themes. To an even greater extent than the first film, 2049 dwells on the questions of what makes us human and what is it to have a soul? The film suggests that it is compassion and empathy, the ability to feel and identify with the feelings of another, that makes us human. In his compassion for both humans and replicants, K turns out to be one of the most human characters of all.

Blade Runner 2049 is long, slowly paced, violent, and packed with dense philosophical ideas. It is also one of the best movies of the year. 

Blade Runner

When Blade Runner came out in 1982, it was a flop. Audiences were probably expecting something entirely different. After all, it starred Harrison Ford who had just appeared in two comparatively bright, optimistic sci fi movies (Star Wars: A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back – maybe you’ve heard of them) as well as the fun, nostalgic Raiders of the Lost Ark. Viewers were likely unprepared for the dark, dystopic, pessimistic story and imagery that awaited them in Blade Runner. So at the time, the film failed to make back its 28 million dollar budget and was seen as a blemish on the track record of both Ford and the film’s director, Ridley Scott. The advent of VHS and home viewing changed things, however, and gave viewers additional chances to reconsider the film – and now, thirty four years later, it is considered to be one of the best, most influential sci fi movies of all time.

Next week, Blade Runner 2049, a sequel produced by Scott and co-starring Ford will arrive in theaters. Directed by Denis Villneuve, the film is set thirty years after the original and features an aging, craggy Ford as former Blade Runner Rick Deckard. Whether it’s a worthy successor to the original remains to be seen (and I will), but this week, I’d like to look back on the original Blade Runner and talk about why it’s still powerful more than three decades later. 

 Set in an ecologically blasted Los Angeles in 2019, the film is the story of Deckard, a retired Blade Runner, or elite cop who hunts and kills Replicants, powerful robots who are almost indistinguishable from humans and who are illegal on Earth. Deckard is recalled into service to find and retire a group of rogue replicants who are trying to literally meet their maker, the head of the corporation that made them.

The film’s masterful visuals are part of why the film endures. The Tyrell Corporation’s massive headquarters that looks like an Aztec temple. The flying cars glaring in the rainy night sky. The lurid, crowded, trash-strewn streets. Replicant Roy Batty punching through a wall as he and Rick Deckard play cat and mouse in an abandoned building. Between the futuristic but still feasible production design of Lawrence Paull and the striking chiaroscuro cinematography by Jordan Cronenweth, Blade Runner looks like both a terrible nightmare of the future and like something very possible. The film presents a complete, persuasive world, and every shot is an atmospheric, claustrophobic masterpiece that is teeming, scuzzy, neon-lit, and rain-slicked.

The film’s marriage of sci fi and film noir also makes it distinct. The story, famously adapted from Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, borrows just as much from The Big Sleep and The Lady of Shanghai. Deckard is a morally ambiguous protagonist trying to get to the bottom of a mystery as he slouches through the dark, rainy streets in his trenchcoat with the upturned collar and a gun under his arm. Rachel, a high-end replicant Deckard wants to protect, is both sexually potent and extremely vulnerable to the various men who surround her, and she shifts her allegiances as necessary for self-preservation like any good femme fatale. And as is the case with most noirs, the city, in this case Los Angeles 2019, is a sprawling metaphor for how humanity has lost itself and become choked with the garbage of its own commercial consumption and moral apathy.

Blade Runner was ahead of its time. Audiences of 1982 weren’t prepared for its darkness or its beauty, but fortunately, we’ve had time to reconsider. If you haven’t seen it yet, you should. Don’t go in looking for a lighthearted time, but do go in prepared to examine every beautiful shot, every compelling sequence and to think about how you interpret the film’s messages about what it is to be truly human. Blade Runner, more than most films, gives viewers both a visual feast and philosophical questions to answer.