Nothing scary at all about ‘The Invasion’

“The Invasion,” the latest screen version of the sci-fi classic “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” (the fourth, if you’re counting), seems to have been invaded by a lot of people, including the Wachowski brothers and their longtime collaborator, director James McTeigue, who were called in to make some necessary tweaks.

(Oliver Hirschbiegel remains credited as the director, alongside writer David Kajganich, whose screenplay was based on Jack Finney’s paranoid 1955 novel “The Body Snatchers.”)

While it’s impossible as a viewer to tell where one person’s work ends and another’s begins, it’s clear that all those voices and influences have resulted in a film that feels truncated, rushed, unfocused and _ worst of all _ not the slightest bit scary or suspenseful.

Nicole Kidman, Daniel Craig and Jeffrey Wright go completely to waste as a few of the last citizens who manage to remain uninfected when a gloopy substance from outer space takes over the population, turning people into emotionless drone versions of themselves.

The whole point of this story has always been to serve as a reflection of its times, whether it’s making a statement about McCarthyism (1956) or Vietnam and Watergate (1978). This time, there are passing TV news references to the war in Iraq and North Korean leader Kim Jong Il, but the film’s political ideology feels tossed in and half-baked.

The invader comes not in alien form but as a microorganism that attaches itself to the space shuttle as it explodes over Earth, shattering into a million little pieces. People touch the wreckage and become infected once they fall asleep. They wake up the next morning unconcerned about the woes of this world, calm, peaceful, except for those moments when they’re intent on spreading the virus to everyone else by throwing up all over them.

Kidman’s Dr. Carol Bennell, a Washington psychiatrist, starts to notice strange behavior in people on the street, in the husband of one of her patients (Veronica Cartwright, in a nod to the 1978 version), even in neighborhood dogs as she and son Oliver (Jackson Bond) go trick-or-treating on Halloween. Then one day, her estranged ex (Jeremy Northam) calls out of the blue wanting to see their son. But he doesn’t quite seem like himself, either.

Naturally, the only thing Carol can do to explain such rampant weirdness is to Google “My husband is not my husband.” That only brings up about 51 million hits but surely the answer must be in there somewhere.

The most compelling scene of all comes toward the end, during a car chase through what is supposed to be Baltimore but is actually downtown Los Angeles. While shooting a stunt crash, Kidman was famously injured and knocked unconscious, a moment she insisted be left in the picture.