Nicole Kidman — no doubt weary of their star meal ticket’s long and devoted pursuit of idiosyncratic art house fare like Birth, The Human Stain, Dogville and Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus — her inking to headline The Invasion, at least the fifth big screen iteration of Jack Finney’s classic 1955 novel The Body Snatchers, must have seemed like a godsend. After all, it’s a big studio movie with an easily graspable (and sellable) hook, and a thriller seemingly made for these paranoid times.

Yet the film opened in the fifth spot at the box office over the weekend, pulling in just under $6 million. Is The Invasion a victim of bad buzz, a casualty of the cresting surge of young-adult interest in Superbad (a $31 million-plus opening) or a minor referendum on the dubious drawing power of Kidman? It’s hard to parse, but the most honest answer is likely some elements of all three. With this and the suppressed grosses of the likewise very (hypothetically) commercial Bewitched, it’s been established pretty conclusively that Kidman doesn’t have a young fan base. Similarly, while older audiences know who she is and seem to generally respect her gifts, her involvement in a project doesn’t bump it up the ladder a rung or two to must-see status.

Directed by German filmmaker Oliver Hirschbiegel (Das Experiment, and Best Foreign Language Film nominee Downfall), The Invasion is a well-meaning and sort of achingly pensive mess, perhaps ruined by too many cooks in the kitchen, perhaps only made bad in slightly different ways. While its mitigating factors are various and sundry (including some car chase re-shoots credited to the Wachowski brothers’ team, as well as other add-ons), it does seem clear that Hirschbiegel set out to make a fairly muted, if not thrill-less thriller — a socio-politically inflected drama about group-think and humanity’s seemingly innate need for cruelty. Whether that film would or could have been better than this muddled, yawning affair is hard to say, though it certainly doesn’t seem like it could have been more incoherent.

Taking place in the wake of a space shuttle crash, with an infectious alien spore draining the personality out of all those it contaminates, The Invasion’s story lurches about in inconsistent fashion, never finding a comfortable balance between stories personal and writ large. After a decent if dispassionate set-up, little logically follows in the second and third act of the debut screenplay credit from writer David Kajganich. If the exoskeleton logic of the movie is, let’s say, faulty at best, it does offer its own diversionary pleasures, though, however unintentional. Perhaps more interesting than anything The Invasion has to offer in terms of narrative in its final two-thirds, is trying to unravel the tangled timeline of the virus’ spread that the movie’s many background news reports paint. For the full review, from FilmStew, click here.