A mysterious virus has come to Earth and has made persons infected soulless. If by any means you get infected, try not to sleep; if you do you will lose you humanity and become a soulless creature when you wake up.

A remake of Jack Finney's novel, The Invasion is the handiwork of Joel Silver. The science fiction movie, though, is not one that gives intellectual stimulation. It makes a mockery of modern science and mass media. A space shuttle crashes and unleashes bacteria which turn people into aliens.

Inoculation to protect against the disease is ordered, but only once did the film showed officials wearing masks to minimise the possibility of catching a disease, the film says is flu-like. Incredibly, the aliens are not portrayed as people suffering from flu, but rather people lacking emotion.

The 93-minute-long film, co-stared by Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig, is based on a struggle between man and soulless replicas, the latter being as a result of an invasion. While the actors were brilliant in their respective roles, gaping holes in the illogical film does not even make it good Sunday afternoon filler. Its incredible how the Washington Post's review would hold it up as "gripping from start to finish".

Kidman, who plays Dr Carol Bennell, a psychiatrist, is one of many persons infected with the soulless virus (call it that because it seems to be spread by dropless infection).

A single mother who is divorced, Kidman allows the father of her son, Tucker, to keep him for a few days, even though he had never been around. But something strange is taking pace everywhere. Suddenly, almost every one sports a remarkably passive persona and is zombie-like.

Antidote

The psychiatrist endeavours to retrieve her son and finds that his father, who is a top alien, also has the virus and passes it on to her. Kindman's son has the gene make-up to counteract this alien virus. And that seemed not to be the only cure as Kidman makes her own antidote for the disease just by walking into a pharmacy.

The film, which places a whole lot of emphasis on the media's coverage of war and foreign policy, did not even for once focus on the gravity of what quickly became a pandemic. There was nothing about the causes or research for causes being broadcast, yet the movie would end with media broadcast on life as it were.

Joel Silver said that the film reflects a scary reality, but if he would put his emotions into a garbage bin for a few seconds he would probably admit that it would have been a better hit if it had been released a decade earlier. Certainly, there is no way a space shuttle would crash and the effects of it are not all over the media. Also, any journalist worth his salt would have detected a massive behavioural change among the population and would have certainly been one of the biggest news story in the film which relies so much on the media coverage of 'special events'.