MOVIE REVIEW: CRIMES OF THE FUTURE (2022)

 Written and Directed by David Cronenberg

Cinematography by Douglas Koch

Production Design by Carol Spier

Music by Howard Shore

Edited by Christopher Donaldson

Produced by Robert Lantos 

Starring

Viggo Mortensen as Saul Tenser

Lea Seydoux as Caprice

Scott Speedman as Lang Dotrice

Lihi Kornowski as Djuna Dotrice

Don McKellar as Wippet

Kristen Stewart as Timlin

Nadia Litz as Router

Tanaya Beatty as Berst

Welket Bungue as Detective Cope

Yorgos Pirpassopoulos as Dr. Nasatir

. . .

"SAVE THE TUMORS!"

-bumper sticker slogan attributed to the American stand-up philosopher George Carlin in the late twentieth century or thereabouts.

"BODY

IS

REALITY"

-slogan appearing on a tube tv screen in the film Crimes of the Future (2022)

. . .

Review by William D. Tucker.

A body changes. A slogan appears on a screen-"BODY IS REALITY." So, reality changes. We are not what we once were. Gestation, birth, growth, exercise, diet, thoughts, beliefs, politics, art, sex, doubt, drugs, tattoos, piercings, aging, surgeries, modifications, medications, infections, sickness, death. Changes we choose, changes we seek, changes by chance, changes imposed by religion, changes imposed by the state. There's who you are, who you want to be, and what others want you to be. A lot of times, instead of the word want the word need gets used, but maybe that's stating the obvious.

In the movie Crimes of the Future, the human species has stopped feeling pain, and it has stopped getting infections . . . so, like, where's the orgy at? 

Whoops. I guess I just laid my cards on the table. Sorry 'bout that.

Clears throat.

In the movie Crimes of the Future, the human species has stopped feeling pain, and it has stopped getting infections. Therefore, naturally, cutting becomes a recreational/sexual activity, and surgeons become performance artists. Instead of going to some boring museum to look at LCDs of some atrocious NFT monkeys, you crowd into what used to be a BDSM fuck dungeon in a post-industrial sector, and watch people get sliced open by precision robotic surgery machines, and then laser-cauterized shut just for the hell of it. I suppose the orgy is to be inferred. Hey, this is still a mainstream narrative movie. You can literally expose someone's guts as part of your content, but heaven help you if you have people fuck in any combination. It ain't boring, that's for sure.

We have various couples:

Saul Tensor and Caprice: Saul has a rare medical condition wherein he constantly grows novel organs that have to be cut out of his abdomen before they crowd out his essential viscera. Caprice is a former trauma surgeon. Together, they are the premiere power couple of the surgical performance art scene. Saul grows it, Caprice uses robotic scalpel armatures to slice it. The harvested novel organs are catalogued and stylishly illustrated into art objects.

Lang and Djuna Dotrice: These two had a son that was a mutant who lived by eating plastic. Mom Djuna was disgusted by this and so murdered her offspring to express her disaproval of such an abomination. Dad Lang is convinced his son was the next stage of human evolution, and so he establishes a radical evolutionary front movement to advocate on behalf of this new mode of being.  So, the question is: was their son an aberration to be shit-canned or the embodiment of the human future?

Wippet and Timlin: These are a pair of colleagues, working on behalf of an evolutionary enforcement agency. They're supposed to be policing radical evolutionaries, but each of them seem to be drawn to the radical surgeries put on by Saul and Caprice, and, possibly, to the radical transformations that Lang is advocating. They're kinda like establishment squares wrestling with their inner freaks. 

Router and Berst: Colleagues, but also a couple. They're technicians who service the biomechanical surgical beds that make the avant garde surgery scene possible. They represent the interests of what passes for Big Tech in this peculiar world. 

Detective Cope and Dr. Nasatir: Not actually a couple, but these two each represent the ideological hardcore. Cope's a lawman looking to gather intel on the evolutionary outlaws. Nasatir's lending his medical expertise to the surgical artists and the mutant faction promoted by Lang. They're enemies, but they don't quite know it.

Crimes of the Future has a lot going on, much of it conveyed through layered, witty dialogue, and cleverly realized special effects setpieces embedded within moody, subterranean production design. The surgery beds have a gristly organic look evoking technology as an extension of human bodies and human desires. 

Accelerated evolution brings about changes in technology, values, identity, sexuality, law, and economics. Some resist the future, others embrace it, still others react with violence. 

I find the characters of Wippet and Timlin especially amusing. They're supposed to be government regulators but they're woefully underfunded and stuck using antiquated dead tree methods of record keeping. 

Saul and Caprice have a couple of memorably perverse scenes of what I suppose could be described as, um, Surgical Sexuality? I said that this is a future wherein people have stopped feeling pain, but there's also the implication that humans have rapidly evolved new sources of pleasure. 

Of course, Crimes of the Future, like many works of science fiction, can be interpreted both literally and metaphorically. We have here themes of sacrificing oneself for one's art; dealing with change; coping with sickness; asserting identity; art criticism; sexuality-it borders on the didactic, but I didn't mind this. Here's a movie with ideas, goddamnit, not a bunch of computer generated wrastling matches. It's funny, it's disturbing, its reach exceeds its grasp, it did not waste my time. 

This is a David Cronenberg movie. He's the guy who made movies like Scanners, The Fly, Dead Ringers, Shivers, Rabid, Crash, Naked Lunch, eXistenZ, The Brood, The Dead Zone, Cosmopolis, Eastern Promises, and Videodrome. These are all movies dealing with questions of the body, of technology, of radical transformations-all within the context of a world driven by greed and the desires of established factions to impose controls upon outlaws, freaks, and rebels. Crimes of the Future is a worthy addition to this ever-mutating body of work. Internet tells me that Cronenberg is almost eighty years old, which makes me think that experience must count for something in this world. 

I look forward to the next one. 

MOVIE REVIEW: WORLD ON A WIRE (1973)

 

Directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder 

Screenplay by Fritz Müller-Scherz and Rainer Werner Fassbinder 

From the novel Simulacron-3 by Daniel F. Galouye 

Cinematography by Michael Ballhaus

Edited by Marie Anne Gerhardt 

Production designed by Kurt Raab 

Costumes by Gabriele Pillon 

Music by Gottfried Hüngsberg

Produced by Peter Märthesheimer and Alexander Wesemann 

Starring 

Klaus Löwitsch as Fred Stiller

Mascha Rabben as Eva Vollmer

Karl-Heinz Vosgerau as Siskins 

Adrian Hoven as Professor Vollmer

Ivan Desny as Günther Lause 

…

"Sorry, I've never heard of a Lause."

…

Review by William D. Tucker.

World on a Wire is one of those science fiction stories that asks We the Audience to play the Reality Game: "What if the world as we know it is just an elaborate, interactive deception? What if We the Inhabitants of this deception are just simulated beings with bogus programmed memories and personality constructs? What would we do if we discovered the illusory nature of our world, our selves? Could we become real on the basis of such insight?"

Amusingly, World on a Wire uses artificial sets, discordant sound effects, voyeuristic camera placement, hypnotic music, and overly precise phrasing of dialogue,framing of shots, and timing of montage to convey such a simulated world. The people here are more like the iconographic avatars of Second Life or The Sims-collections of gestures, wardrobe, and obsessively goal-focused patterns of thought and speech, lacking the emotional fuzziness and warmth of a more natural acting style. 

This world is a simulation, after all, and simulations are typically constructed at great expense to achieve some sort of instrumentality, usually economic, political, entertainment, and/or military in nature. Therefore, the idiosyncrasies of emergent, evolutionary humanity are streamlined to suit whatever variables are deemed significant to the project's decision makers. 

Our-the Audience's-video game avatar is a computer engineer named Fred Stiller, who has helped build an elaborate simulated virtual world called Simulacron-3. Stiller's motivations are pure science and the public good. But Simulacron-3 could only be realized via a convergence of corporate, governmental, and idiosyncratic psychological interests. Big business wants a leg-up on the competition via omni-variable economic forecasts. The government most likely desires some sort of intelligence and surveillance level-up, though this aspect is  muted in World on a Wire. The project is being underwritten by tax revenues from the public, who, as per usual, don't seem to have much democratic control over the process. Technocratic daydream believin' elites seem to trump a skeptical public as per usual in science fiction. 

Stiller loses his grip on reality when a colleague is seemingly erased from everyone's memory except his own,  a man named Lause.

Before we meet Stiller, we witness a scene wherein Lause has to make sense out of the sudden inexplicable death of Dr. Vollmer, the chief architect of Simulacron-3. So, We the Audience are led to believe in the objective existence of Lause.

Later, Stiller sees Lause in a nightclub. And then Lause disappears. Moreover, no one seems to remember the very existence of Lause . . . except for Stiller. 

Nowadays, this plays like a blatant "Glitch in the Matrix." Someone or something has rewritten the reality all around Stiller while neglecting-or failing-to change Stiller's memories. 

Stiller cannot deny the reality of his memory and so he pursues this phantom Lause to the uttermost distance, beyond job security, beyond the law, beyond the limits of his own sanity. 

Of course, another reading of World on a Wire is that Stiller is actually losing his mind due to some combination of work stress, undiagnosed mental illness, and maybe some kind of substance abuse. The corporate/governmental intrigues surrounding the Simulacron-3 project are intense. Stiller's boss tries to replace him with a new hire with loyalties to a steel company. The steel company wants privileged access to the economic forecasting powers of Simulacron-3 by means of what amounts to an industrial spy. The idealistic Stiller could be suffering from a growing disillusionment as he bears witness to this chicanery, which might feed into some type of paranoia.

I think the intention here is to get the audience on Stiller's side. He keeps his cool. He's intellectual. Even his frustrated outbursts are carefully modulated. We already know that Lause existed outside of Stiller's memory. We want Stiller to solve the mystery. 

However, science fiction can and does work on both the literal and metaphorical levels. Even if we believe in Stiller, World on a Wire could be read as a commentary on the pressure and duplicity one must endure in a high stakes technology start-up. The confusions over what's real and what's illusion could be a critique of the hype cycles surrounding the advent of any new and fashionable gadget or process or management doctrine. 

If you ever have the time, go to a big university library and browse the stacks with the business school texts. Take note of the titles and trends and fads. As an American, I'm always amused by the volume of titles predicting Japan's impending takeover of global capitalism. Plenty of smart, well educated, well trained people get caught up devising trendy scenarios pandering to the financial titans of the moment. Maybe it is this crooked process that drives Stiller nuts since this is a direct assault on his core identity as a socially conscious champion of pure, unbiased scientific research. 

Mirrors are everywhere in World on a Wire. A biased simulation just reflects back increasingly distorted images of what we desperately wish to be true. And unfortunately, even a distorted simulation can be used to inflate consumer and, more importantly, shareholder confidence. 

World on a Wire also mixes in elements of film noir, hard-boiled detective fiction, and James Bond. Stiller is a two-fisted computer nerd who dresses in tuxedos and pinstriped suits, drives a sports car, and always gets laid. Plenty of fighting and fucking in this techno-thriller. These macho cliches also point up the artificial nature of what transpires with a high degree of self-aware camp. The fact that Stiller's executive secretary also seems to function as a concubine is a clue that there's something weird about this reality that seems to pander to a specific set of desires and corporate fetishes. 

As Stiller gets deeper into things, we have scenes set inside a nightclub where a Marlene Dietrich impersonator sings in the face of impending execution by Nazis who march while singing television advertising jingles. Before she is shot, the Dietrich doppelganger looks at her reflection in a sword and freshens her lipstick. Is Simulacron-3, this carefully crafted simulation, attaining self-awareness? Is it evolving a counterculture with a fuck you attitude to corporate capitalism? World on a Wire has fun with these possibilities. 

MOVIE REVIEW: OUTLAND (1981)

 Written and Directed by Peter Hyams

Special Effects John Stears

Special Optical Effects Supervisor Roy Field

Production Designer Philip Harrison

Art Director Malcolm Middleton

Costume Designer John Mollo

Make-Up Peter Robb-King

Director of Photography Stephen Goldblatt

Head of Video Department Richard Hewitt

Editor Suart Baird

Produced by Richard A. Roth

Music by Jerry Goldsmith

Leisure Club Music Produced and Composed by Richard Rudolph and Michael Boddicker and performed by Ganymede

Starring 

Sean Connery

Frances Sternhagen

Peter Boyle

James B. Sikking

…

“It figures. It’s all happened too sudden. People gotta talk themselves into law and order before they do anything about it. Maybe because down deep they don’t care. They just don’t care.”

-Lon Chaney, ex-Wolf Man, former Jr., in High Noon (1952)

“Never send a human to do a machine’s job.”

-Agent Smith in The Matrix (1999)

…

Review by William D. Tucker.

The Company is back. Kinda. I’m talking about the Company referred to in the  1979 film Alien, and, well, they’re up to their old tricks of exploiting workers’ desire for wealth and adventure out on the frontiers of space. This time the setting is a harsh, dystopian mining colony on Io, a moon of Jupiter. The colony proper comes across on screen as a  warren of cage-like capsule bedrooms and spartan apartments alleviated by a laser light titty bar, some wall tennis courts, a bleak cafeteria, video golf for the hardcore assholes, and legalized prostitution. 

Workers have been behaving erratically in statistically significant numbers: suicides, assaults, murders, all seemingly coming about due to the extreme psychological stress of working in an ugly, depressing, dehumanizing environment. A guy takes off his spacesuit helmet while on a moon surface worksite. Another guy enters an airlock with no suit, just regular clothes, and a cigarette behind his ear. Guess he was going out for a smoke. Sex workers are reporting injuries due to assaults, rapes, and beatings in higher than normal numbers. The Io colony is not a happy place. 

Head explosions are a thing in this movie. Caused by explosive decompression. Which is not scientifically accurate. I dunno, maybe there’s something weird about the way the pressurized atmospheric environments interact with the monumental gravitational force exerted by Jupiter? Eh? (Shrug) I never been to Jupiter, okay, so I can’t speak about it from direct experience. Of course, the movie follows a theme of ‘people under pressure’ which is to some degree literal, but also metaphorical. So, I don’t know, maybe the various head explosions are meant to be taken, um, not so literally? Look, if you’re a stickler for scientific accuracy, you’re probably gonna laugh at those bits, so that’s not super-terrible. It’s kinda fun in a sicko sort of way.  

On top of everything else at the Io colony-the suicides, the murders, the brutalizations, the sexual violence-on top of all of it . . . there are fucking cops on the moon of Jupiter. That’s right. LIke they needed that as a cherry to lord it over the turd cake. Not just regular cops, either-space marshals. And who is the Number One Space Marshal on Io? Sean Connery, of course. 

But this isn’t 007 Connery. This is Connery when he was in his real prime as an actor. When he was older, and when the roles had nuances worth digging into. A lot of people like to say, “Oh, Connery was the best Bond. He was the best as 007!” And, you know, sure. You can say that. But if you actually look back at those Connery Bonds, I think you’ll see he was at his best during moments of absurdist comedy. The look on his face when a woman tells him her name is Pussy Galore in Goldfinger. It’s the same look he has on his face when he shows up  dressed to the nines at a sleazy casino full of cowboys in leisure suits in Reno in Diamonds Are Forever. Connery mastered deadpan comedy beats as 007. But I don’t think he really came into his own as a dramatic actor until much later in his career. 

In Outland Connery’s marshal character is very much inspired by Gary Cooper’s beleaguered lawman in High Noon, as he realizes that the entire system of the lunar mining colony runs on greed, corruption, and the murder of anybody who fights the extractive-capitalist status quo. Gary Cooper gets deserted by the entire town of Hadleyville. Sean Connery stands alone on the moon of Jupiter. Harsh realm, my dude, harsh realm. 

Like Alien, Outland is a highly inductive piece of film, assembling a wealth of fascinating science fiction world-building details that eventually submit to the grand deduction of the total fuckedness of existence under no limits gangster capitalism. The Company has constructed the perfect system that can function no matter the misery and waste it generates in volumetric quantites. 

But there are moments where the inhuman perfection glitches:

-an assassin using a futuristic infrared scope botches his shot when sweat gets in his eye;

-the greedy corporate supervisor played by Peter Boyle as a version of his maniacal character from Joe-think of him as ‘Joe made good’-playing video golf. Just like a proper all-American oligarchic asshole would;

-Sean Connery and his corrupt subordiante James B. Sikking slamming tennis balls against a slab of what looks like the Berlin Wall to pass the time, and avoid confronting their growing rift directly;

-Connery wields a sawed-off shotgun because buckshot scatters, and that’s safer than a rifled shell which would drill holes through the walls of the pressurized space colony and thus cause everyone’s head to exlode . . . but I think we can all agree: buckshot or shell, let’s not go firing off guns inside space colonies or space ships, okay? Glad we all agree . . .

-the fact that Connery actually engages in some detailed detective work, aided and abetted by Frances Sternhagen’s ornery moon doctor-how much actual sleuthing happened in 1982’s Blade Runner, eh? Yup. Outland, tho’ mostly forgotten by pop culture, is a better police procedural future investigation than the 1982 world-building trendsetter.

Speaking of forgotten movies: my legitimate Warner Brothers DVD copy which I bought for $5+applicable sales tax some, I dunno, ten or eleven years ago? It has the video quality of a bootleg VHS rip. Technically, it’s in letterbox-not the ‘enhanced for widescreen TVs’ lies printed on the insert paper on the inside of the plastic sleeve-which means you can watch it in its proper aspect ratio but it’s smaller on the screen than it should be. This kinda sucks . . . but it is amusing that I can have the thrill of watching what feels like a bootleg VHS-perhaps purchased through a late-1990s Luminous Film Works catalog of gray market reduplications-from a ‘legitimate’ home media release.

It’s the fuckin’ Company, man.

You just can’t win.

MOVIE REVIEW: ALIEN (1979)

 Directed by Ridley Scott

Jones trained by Animals Unlimited

Alien design by H.R. Giger

Alien head effects by Carlo Rambaldi

Special Effects Supervisors Brian Johnson and Nick Allder

Concept Artist Ron Cobb

Production Designer Michael Seymour

Art Directors Les Dilley and Roger Christian

Screenplay by Dan O’Bannon

Story by Dan O’Bannon and Ronald Shusett

Director of Photography Derek Vanlint

Edited by Terry Rawlings

Executive Producer Ronald Shusett

Produced by Gordon Carroll, David Giler, and Walter Hill

Music by Jerry Goldsmith

Starring

Sigourney Weaver as Ripley

Yaphet Kotto as Parker

Tom Skerritt as Dallas

Ian Holm as Ash

Veronica Cartwright as Lambert

Harry Dean Stanton as Brett

John Hurt as Kane

Bolaji Badejo as the alien

Helen Horton as the voice of Mother

Jones is Jones

...

“Pathetic earthlings, hurling your bodies out into the void without the slightest inkling of who or what is out here. If you’d known anything about the true nature of the universe, anything at all, you would have hidden from it in terror.”

-Emperor Ming the Merciless, Ruler of the Universe in Flash Gordon (1980)

…

Review by William D. Tucker.

In the future, being an intergalactic space traveller is just another shit-ass fuckin’ job. You’re basically an extension of an artificially intelligent space ship-the whole goddamn operation could run without any all-too-human bags of meat, couldn’t it? The only reason why you’re there is politics and economics: labor negotiations to ensure jobs for highly evolved primates inside the hyper-rationalized, mostly autonomous ultra-tech resource extraction industries of whatever distant century within which Alien takes place. 

The space ship is the Nostromo, a vast and ugly, yet star-worthy, mobile ore extractor, refinery, and transport vessel, which visually evokes a dystopian devolution of Cloud City from The Empire Strikes Back. When we first see the Nostromo it’s in visual contrast to a huge, Saturn-like planet with impressive rings of space rocks, and all this measured against the pitiless void of space. We eventually go inside the Nostromo, and it is so dense with Millenium Falcon-esque run-down retro-future details that, if you’re watching this at home-as opposed to a COVID-19 superspreader theater-you’ll want to pause and play back a lot of the scenes after you watch it through once without stopping, just to try to suss out what all the gadgets and junk are supposed to be:

-robot heads that seem to pilot the craft whilst the human crew are locked in cryogenic hypersleep-those fuckin’ robo-heads always creep me out, as they seem to be sending and receiving some kind of machine language, which you know is bad, right? When the machines are talking to each other when no humans are around . . .

-what is that-is that an elephant key chain hanging on someone’s astro-navigation monitor? Is that Dumbo? Someone adding a little kitschy human flair to their work station?

-smooth glide, stalkery camera maneuvers combined with Jerry Goldsmith’s eerie score give us the sense that the Nostromo is haunted by some unseen, pervasive evil presence-which would be capitalism, of course-BUT, if you mute the sound and watch it again, it’s almost like a virtual tour of some second hand space craft. Try before you buy.

-and then we get to the hypersleep bed-pods. The lids open. John Hurt slowly sits up, awakening from a no doubt years-long slumber. He’s so pale and withered looking. Yet he has a kind of anguished Zen about him, as though he is resigned to his dehumanizing fate as a disposable cog in the overall corporate machine. A quintessentially John Hurt moment-see also 1984. 

-and soon the rest of the crew is awake, and gathered around the mess table, eating a variety of vaccuum-packed self-heating meals. You’ve got the alert and by-the-book science officer Ian Holm, who’ll surely dole out plenty of technobabble and vital exposition as the movie chugs along. You have chief engineer Yaphet Kotto who brings up the “bonus situation” on behalf of himself and his fellow below-the-line engineer Harry Dean Stanton. Tom Skerritt as the laconic hard-on of a captain tells him everybody gets paid what’s in their contract-so, a very reasonable, “Fuck you.”

Warrant Officer Sigourney Weaver and astro-navigator Veronica Cartwright soon realize that their star charts are all wrong for an automated return trip to Earth. Something has diverted their homeward voyage: a signal, of either distress or warning, from an unknown source on an unexplored planet. The laws of space travel require that any capable crew has to assist another vessel in distress, and so the homeward voyage becomes a rescue operation. 

Look, you’ve seen Alien, right? This is one of those movies everybody’s seen. Or it used to be. It still is, right? Is it possible to spoil Alien, in this miserable fucking pandemic year of 2020? 

I’ll err on the side of caution. I’ll try not to totally spoil this one, ‘cause it is one of the best. Not so much in terms of absolute originality of ideas or themes-Alien is highly derivative of earlier sci-fi B-movie thrillers. Screenwriter Dan O’Bannon may have lifted a crucially disgusting aspect of the titular alien creature’s life cycle from David Cronenberg’s Shivers, tho’ I don’t know that for sure. I wasn’t there myself, you know. 

What sells Alien is the obsessively wrought production designs of the Nostromo and the structures awaiting the human crew upon the surface of the planet where the mysterious signal originates; the off-the-cuff Robert Altman-esque overlapping dialogue scenes shot and edited in what William Friedkin would call “induced documentary” style; the nasty twists and turns of plot as the wealth of inductive details give way to terrifying deductions about the horrors that are possible in a universe that is both mind-numbingly vast and utterly indifferent to human moral conceptions-

-okay, okay, I’ll do a major spoiler . . .

. . . WARNING! WARNING!

YOU ARE ENTERING A SPOILER CONTAINMENT ZONE . . .

. . . the Company sends mostly extraneous humans on their mostly automated ship because machines can’t be infected with parasites. Thinky meat-bags chasing paychecks and financial stability and bonuses and class mobility are the bait, my friend . . .

YOU ARE NOW EXITING THE SPOILER CONTAINMENT ZONE.

Just one more thing, Human.

There’s a scene that really got to me this last time I watched Alien. 

Okay, the Nostromo is run by an intelligent computer called Mother. Mother-or some sub-system of her-is engaged with an ongoing translation process of the signal from the alien planet. This process is entirely automated. When it’s done, there’ll no doubt be a ping or a beep and an indicator light. But Sigourney Weaver insists on watching the raw feed, the translation-in-process-not because she or anyone else on the crew can do anything to make Mother’s work go faster . . . I guess she just wants to be there as the results come in, even if all she can do is take it in, and see if the new information clarifies the larger situation. 

We are hypnotized by a flow of inductive detail, so compelling, so novel, leaving so many possibilities wide open, until we are crushed by the grand deduction that it all adds up to being cosmically fucked to death by both alien indifference to the value of our lives and human malice towards the same. 

Enemy without. Enemy within. 

Right. 

MOVIE REVIEW: INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS (1956)

Starring
Kevin McCarthy
Dana Wynter

Directed by Don Siegel
Screenplay by Daniel Mainwaring and Richard Manning
From the novel by Jack Finney
Executive Produced by Walter Mirisch
Cinematography by Ellsworth Fredericks
Edited by Robert S. Eisen
Production Design by Ted Haworth
Special Effects by Milt Rice and Don Post

Review by William D. Tucker. 

Widescreen, black and white, a man in hysterics is brought under police escort before a doctor and a psychiatrist at an emergency room. He has a whale of a tale to tell: a saga of alien invaders taking over human bodies and minds. Much like the 1950 film noir D.O.A., we get the grim story in flashback:

A doctor returns from a conference to find his hometown transforming before his eyes.

The community seems to be suffering from some sort of mass hysteria. People are claiming their loved ones have stopped being who they once were-a mother is no longer a mother, a father is no longer a father. Oh, sure, Dad looks exactly the same as always, same face, same eyes, same nose, the voice is the same-in other words there's no chance that it's some stranger attempting a bold impersonation. But something is different about Dad. Something subtle, yet huge. The emotions are not quite right. This new father, or new mother, has less emotion than before, and the whole thing is inexplicable. It's the kind of thing you notice about someone you've known all your life, but that maybe wouldn't be so obvious to someone outside of the family. A crucial detail has been erased giving the lie to this . . . duplication.

You try to call the police, or a psychiatrist, maybe your general practitioner-you try to get someone to believe you when you say that this person you've known all your life is no longer that very same person. And all you get is a blank stare, a condescending smile, and a recommendation to lay off the sauce. The especially understanding doctor in this movie, Dr. Bennell (played by the great Kevin McCarthy), might give you some pills to help you relax. Help you sleep.

Dr. Bennell doesn't know it at first, but that's when they get you. When you're asleep. Seed pods from outer space. They duplicate you, mind, body, and maybe even soul, if you want to go there.

We're talking about the world famous Invasion of the Body Snatchers, a stark example of weird horror built out of paranoia, insomnia, film noir lighting dialed down a few notches, and the fear of the total loss of one's individual humanity. Director Don Siegel, more known for his hard-boiled crime thrillers The Killers, Coogan's Bluff, and Dirty Harry, among others, keeps the pace tight, and parcels out some effectively gruesome, yet mysterious, moments of gooey shock. Quite a bit is left unexplained. The ending is ambiguous, but cautiously hopeful. We in the audience are either witnessing the end of the human race or a very close call.

One big thing that is left mysterious is the exact mechanism by which the alien seed pods duplicate people. When you watch this film, ask yourself: do individual pods bond with individual human targets? Is some sort of psionic power involved in order to scan and duplicate the mind? Is this same psionic facility, if that's what we're dealing with here, the same method by which certain parts of the original person's personality are excised? Or are we dealing with imperfections in the duplication process? Maybe when a person is duplicated by the alien seed pods some elements of the person's mind and personality are accidentally eliminated. So the changes in the duplicated person may not be sinister or malign in any intentional way. The alterations are just by-products of the aliens' natural survival functions.

Will the process of duplication ever improve? If this duplication process could ever be perfected, then what would the difference be between an original and a perfect copy? Why all the fuss? I mean, if the pods win, no one would care. We'd each be a duplication, and we'd get on with business as usual. Especially if the aliens get better at duplicating people. But even if they don't, well . . . people get used to things. You know?

As Dr. Bennell investigates this eerie situation he comes to see himself as a lone agent pitted against an overwhelming force that's seeking to erase the essence of the human spirit. Dr. Bennell offers this rather stirring speech:

"In my practice, I've seen how people have allowed their humanity to drain away. Only it happened slowly instead of all at once. They didn't seem to mind . . . All of us, a little bit, we harden our hearts, grow callous. Only when we have to fight to stay human do we realize how precious it is to us, how dear."

Dr. Bennell later confronts one of these pod people accusing it of wanting to erase love, passion, desire, and ambition from the hearts of men. The duplication calmly tells him that all these things aren't really necessary, that love and passion inevitably fade, and he'll wake up the next day feeling much better with no more worries and concerns. And besides, the duplication says, "You don't have a choice." That doesn't go over too well with the fiercely individualistic Dr. Bennell.

I find it funny that a horror story could be built around the idea of how awful it is to be a conformist. People want to conform. People want to belong to a group, to a family, to a tribe, to a nation; or maybe just root for the home team. Humans love to gather at political rallies or places of religious worship, or college football stadiums and respond in socially approved ways to ritualistic speeches and spectacles. Sure, horrific things grow out of such activities-genocide, war, greed, racism, homophobia, misogyny, ultra-nationalism, imperialism, religious corruption of secular government and education, beer guts-but that's just human nature going back thousands of years. We don't need aliens to give us such atrocities. Maybe the pod people, with their dialed back passions, and their hyper-logical outlook on existence, are really an improvement on the old model of humanity.

We'll never know unless we give the pod people a chance.