'Invasion' worth being quiet about

For a movie that stars both Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig, you'd think there would be a lot more buzz surrounding "The Invasion."

I mean, have you seen either of them on the talk show circuit, hyping this film up? It's tiptoeing into theaters, almost as if trying not to make its presence known -- just like the rampant epidemic that's at the center of the film.

Of course, all one has to do is view the film to realize why the movie is getting such a quiet release: It's a thunderous, indecipherable mess.

Practically the 200th rehashing of Jack Finney's "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" novel, "Invasion" is a pile-up of a high-maintenance horror movie that never succeeds at being the tense, thought-provoking film it wants to be.

For starters, we have Kidman, mostly running around in snug, Donna Karan gear as Washington psychiatrist Carol Bennell. She's a divorced mom who starts noticing that some of the people around her are acting a bit strange.

It turns out most of them have been infected with a virus that was brought to Earth when a shuttle crashed onto American soil. Now she must blend in with all these blank-faced, nondescript pod people (for Kidman, is that really a stretch?) to find her son (Jackson Bond), who could be the key to creating an antidote.

It's funny how Kidman keeps getting called to star in remakes of movies where she realizes there are some strange things afoot and must take action.

Didn't she go through this nonsense three years ago in that dopey "Stepford Wives" remake? And as the handsome director who wants to be more than her best bud, Craig, who just killed it as James Bond in "Casino Royale," is sadly wasted, walking around in aviator shades and looking as if he just got through shooting a spread for Men's Vogue.

Savvier moviegoers may do as I did and wonder which scenes were written by "The Matrix" filmmakers Andy and Larry Wachowski and shot by their protege, "V for Vendetta" director James McTeigue.

While the movie was originally shot by German director Oliver Hirschbiegel ("Downfall"), the men were called in by Warner Bros. (along with the movie's producer and "Matrix" collaborator Joel Silver) to give the whole thing some more juice. Something tells me they may be the ones who added scenes that thickly lay on the movie's paranoid, conspiratorial subtext.

Just as Don Siegel's 1956 original was an allegory on communism and McCarthyist fear-mongering, and Philip Kaufman's 1978 remake sent up New Age conformity in the cynical, post-Watergate era, this "Invasion" infects its characters to comment on our lethargic society and how we're being pacified by an information-withholding government.

That's a smart idea. It would have been even smarter if characters didn't need to spout dialogue every 20 minutes reminding us that's what the story is about.

"Invasion" takes so much of its sweet time trying to prove that it's more than a scarefest, that it's trying to tell you Something Important, that it doesn't end up scaring anybody.

In a time when movies like "Children of Men" and the underappreciated "28 Weeks Later" do a more subversive, more chilling job of reminding audiences to wake up and take stock of the lies and half-truths some in power are telling us, the obvious, heavy-handed testifying of "The Invasion" seems rushed and pointless.

No wonder Kidman and Craig haven't been seen promoting "Invasion." They're starring in a film that tells us stuff we've already heard before -- from better movies.