Welcome back fellow humans. I trust you've all been tending to your gardens?
Getting lots of rest?
Good. Very good. Keep at it!
With that, it's back into the green house for cultivating another batch of pods for this year's Halloween run.
In what might be the biggest timeline jump I've done so far (give or take for how you want to read last year's segue into the extended universe of The Thing), we're jumping 22 years ahead from where Don Siegel left the town of Santa Mira, CA to its alien fate.
This time around, the baton went to Philip Kaufman – who saw this as an opportunity not to simply remake the original (which he has gone on record as being a fan of) but rather to make a variation on a theme.
Something about the desolate landscape on this poster just feels
incredibly appropriate given the tone the movie leans into.
Which is an interesting way to put it, given his version has, for many, become the definitive variation of the series – so much so that his version of the pod person has become the one ingrained into the popular culture, most famously in the image of them pointing and shrieking to identify those not yet turned.
Like its predecessor, this is an entry I was having a hard time deciding how to approach at first. One part because I've already discussed it on here back in the day, and one part because so much has already been said for it.
What's been said has been justified, of course. Over 40 years later, this movie still works well. True, some of the aesthetic is a bit dated, but that is pretty unavoidable. Once you adjust to that, the movie still plays very well as a thriller, slowly building its paranoia and taking that early time to let you grow to become invested in the small group of characters caught up in the growing menace.
Speaking of that slow burn, that's actually the aspect I wanted to focus on this time. Like The Thing last year, this is a movie I've revisited many times over the years, so for this, rather than just do to a general overview, I was challenging myself to stick to a single particular facet of the movie.
Tangential to where I'm going with this, I will die on the hill
that these versions of the pods are the most visually unsettling.
In trying to do that, it finally hit me just how well Kaufman builds that menace into the movie from the get-go. Some of it's easy to see up front – like the first movie, we have the numerous people who know something is wrong, but can't put their finger on what (there's definitely a social commentary aspect to the fact the first characters we see picking up on it are women and minorities who ultimately go ignored) – and that's by design to help bait the hook.
Then there's the parts that aren't as readily apparent to a first time viewer – things like the scene early on when Brooke Adams unknowingly picks one of the pods. Naturally, our focus is on her, but it's also hard not to pick up on the conversation going on around her, as children are led out to the garden by their teachers, encouraged to pick flowers to bring home to their parents. Once you know what's coming, it seems obvious, but watched in a vacuum, it plays as fairly benign.
Particularly compared to its later accompanying, and far darker, moment when a group of school children are being led into a building where they're being told it's time to take naps. By the time that scene occurs, we know the grim fate that awaits the kids far better than we do in that first moment, but revisiting that first moment becomes much darker in that regard in hindsight.
predecessor, I find myself subscribing to the fan theory that
Kaufman made a sequel where that bookend never happened
and Bennell's been on the run for years.
The same goes for the recurring scenes of the waste removal trucks. It's one of those aspects that reads as fairly benign on that first watch in a vacuum, then takes on a whole new tone on the revisit – particularly when you look in the hopper and note there is no other garbage in that mixture other than the almost literal ashes of the human race.
Dread is a tricky formula to get right in a movie – it's easy to risk laying it on too thick and showing your hand, or couching too much in mystery that loses its value on a rewatch. Kaufman strikes a good balance here, with many of the smaller clues becoming much grimmer horrors filling in the margins on later viewings, more fully painting in the picture of what rapidly becomes clear is a larger destruction of humanity unfolding around our unknowing heroes.
The result is a feeling that, having now seen every entry in the series, feels ultimately unique to this movie. It's the one Body Snatchers film I would say manages to feel genuinely apocalyptic. There's others that flirt with that line with ambiguity, but no other entry sounds the death knell for the human race with as much certainty as this one does, and given how much of it is baked into the movie from the start, it really pays off in the final minutes of the movie – it's possible Veronica Cartwright isn't the last human left on the planet, or in the city, but for our purposes, she may as well be. And as such, it's hard not to sympathize and share in her terror as that knowledge hits home with one last alien shriek.
On that note - we as a society don't give Veronica Cartwright
nearly enough credit as an actress. This would have been an
easy scene to botch and she nails it - both in the initial shock
and horror as well as that subsequent moment where it looks
as though the last of her sanity has just snapped realizing
this is the end.
Which brings us to a close for another entry.
It will be a little less than twenty years before the next entry – though our own visit to Abel Ferrara's The Body Snatchers will be in considerably less time. Until then, stay safe, and keep watering those plants.
No reason. They just look nice, that's all.
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