20 Most Hated Film Remakes & Reboots In Movie History

A remake of a remake of a remake? Or a new twist on an old story? German director Oliver Hirschbiegel and writer Dave Kajganich (along with the studio) were convinced it was the latter - that The Invasion was a sufficiently fresh spin on the pod-people-from-another-world tale to merit a fresh go at the multiplex.

It wasn’t. Don Siegel’s seminal 1956 film Invasion Of The Bodysnatchers still remains, for many, the best of the cinematic adaptations of Jack Finney’s novel The Bodysnatchers, although many more have a soft spot for the excellent 1978 remake by Philip Kaufman starring Donald Sutherland and Jeff Goldblum. There are even plenty of people who prefer Abel Ferrara’s looser, nastier remake, 1993’s Body Snatchers, a film that takes on elements of all the iterations of the concept to date to make something entirely new, with a new cast of characters.

No one prefers this incoherent, lifeless latter-day version. Like a game of ‘exquisite corpse’, it plays as though written by a committee of people who were never in the same room: a description not too far from the truth, given that the studio brought the Wachowski siblings to write and James McTeigue to direct multiple revisions after the fact.

This time, the extraterrestrial ‘pod-person’ effect is the product of a sentient virus… upon infection, it waits until you fall asleep, covers you in goo and converts you. No doubt this was intended to be an intelligent sci-fi update of the hoary old premise, but instead it changes the whole basis for the unfolding nightmare.

Instead of being a paranoid thriller about an unstoppable sub rosa alien invasion, The Invasion is actually a bog standard ‘viral apocalypse’ with superfluous, bolted-on car chases. As I’ve written about before, the problem with that scenario is that it comes complete with its own reset button happy ending - after all, Hollywood science can simply reverse engineer a cure and bring everything back to normal, which is exactly what happens here in this unnecessary, screwed-up, patchwork mess.

Oh, and a remake of a remake of a remake? There’s a reason we don’t photocopy photocopies of photocopies, people.