Cinema Cycle - Invasion of the Body Snatchers

CINEMA CYCLE

(Cardio Workout And Reviewing Movies At The Same Time)

DATE: 09/29/2014

TITLE: Invasion of the Body Snatchers

FORMAT: LaserDisc

TIME RIDDEN / FILM LENGTH: 1 hour 23 minutes

DISTANCE RIDDEN WHILE VIEWING: 16.8 miles

TOTAL CINEMA MILES LOGGED: 522.5 miles

SYNOPSIS: A small town doctor discovers that his neighbors are being turned into emotionless zombies by mysterious alien seed pods.

CONCEPT IN RELATION TO THE VIEWER: The original paranoia film.  You can’t fight what you don’t understand and can’t comprehend.  

PROS AND CONS: When I was a wee lad, there were two films that scared the heebie jeebies out of me.  The first was the original ‘War of the Worlds’ and the second was this film.  They both imprinted on my young impressionable mind that there were things in this world that could not be fought with guns and tanks.  You never knew what science and the unknown had in store for us. There were things in the universe that we did not understand.

This film is often referenced in association with the ‘Red Menace’ scare of the 1950s.  The seed pods were an allegory for the concept of communism and how that form of political thought would turn us all into mindless automatons.  While that undercurrent is evident in the film I noticed something else as I watched it as an adult.  

The ‘pod people’ in the film are actually quite normal, they just lack emotion and empathy for others.  The protagonist, Dr. Miles Bennell, references this in the film when he states that he has seen this behavior prior to the invasion of the pods.  While running from the invaders Dr. Bennell states that many people throughout his life have ‘let their humanity drain away as they get older’.  In essence, stating that as a society we can become numb and lose our ability to care for others.  Something that is pretty profound in a world of social networking and Fox News.

To read an overview of this project, check out the initial post for this series.

This film is a part of my LaserDisc Collection.

Clicking on the title will take you to the Internet Movie Database (IMDB) entry for this film. 

This film was viewed while exercising on my recumbent cycle.  A summary of my time spent working out on my journey through movie-land can be found on Strava.com.

The summary of the project and a glimpse of what is coming up next can be found on my public LaserDisc spreadsheet.