The 1956 film was a product of its time; for it studied the stifling effects of conformity.

The 1978 film was a product of its time; for it wallowed in the paranoia of a culture that refused to trust anyone.

The 1993 film was a product of its time; for it thrashed about in the identity crisis of the post-slasher horror film, and the confusion of military America.

And now, we have The Invasion, an adaption of Jack Finney's The Body Snatchers for 2007, and it is a product of its time; for it assumes that the audience has the intelligence and attention span of a 12-year-old jacked up on caffeine.

Before I begin, I want to reply to myself: of the previous three filmed adaptations of the novel, I have had the fewest nice things to say about Abel Ferrara's Body Snatchers, and the least sensible understanding of how it fit into its era. Something important happened to me between writing that review and now, and that is that I saw the new film, and seeing how badly the same themes could be mangled (for the 1993 and 2007 iterations of the story are much closer to each other than either is to the first two) made me freshly appreciate how delicately Ferrara et al worked in their study of how America deals with its military power in a post-Cold War world, especially when that military power gets used in the Middle East.

Because The Invasion, although it does some things awfully well, assumes that you are an idiot. You, personally, and you need to have everything spelled out for you in unmistakably precise detail. It certainly can't be accused of having no ideas, like some summer movies, but as things stand I'm quite confident in saying that this film takes the prize for the most condescending film of 2007 so far.

In this iteration of the story, we follow Dr. Carol Bennell (Nicole Kidman), a psychiatrist with a maddeningly adorable son,* Oliver (Jackson Bond). As the story opens, something has caused the Space Shuttle Patriot (remember that kids, it's the only time that the theme is expressed quietly) to crash land, and it doesn't take the Centers for Disease Control, as embodied by Carol's ex-husband and Oliver's father Tucker Kaufman (Jeremy Northam), whose last name I demand be an homage to Philip Kaufman, director of the 1978 film, to discover that some kind of virus has come down with the shuttle.

Although the target audience for this film probably isn't aware that other versions of the story exist, to say nothing of having seen those versions, it doesn't take an encyclopedic knowledge of the previous films to figure out that something is awfully wrong with that virus, when it seems to take over a bevy of people, including Tucker, but that's skipping ahead. First we need to see all sorts of business involving Carol and her son, Carol and her job (including a paranoid woman played by the cinema's great Paranoid Woman, Veronica Cartwright, a veteran of the 1978 iteration), and Carol and Dr. Ben Driscoll (Daniel Craig), her across-the-street neighbor and best friend and future lover. One particular scene that eats up a great deal of running time, or at least feels like it does, involves Ben taking Carol to a state dinner at the home of the Bellicecs, two delightful old Czech people, where Carol has a conversation with Andrei Cartoonisk-Rooshian (Rogers Rees, who is better than this. And the character's real name is Yorish). What follows is one of the most ham-handed, artlessly literal moments of thematic exposition of the year, if not the decade, although it would be hyperbole to go further than that. Anyway, here's the gist of their endless conversation: the Russian says that people are mostly nasty. Carol demures. The Russian suggests that the only way that peace will ever be achieved is if humans stop being human - if they lose their emotions and passions. Carol pouts. The Russian says, "Get it? When the alien virus replaces us all with emotionless clones, we'll achieve world harmony, but is it worth the cost? Isn't it better to be awful animals that kill each other but are honest about it?" Carol tosses her hair and giggles.

You know, the earlier films weren't exactly "subtle," but they had nothing on this. This is just obscene. And the film keeps! coming! back! to the same idea, always presented as clumsily: whether the lengthy scene in which CNN and Fox News report on how everywhere from North Korea to Gaza to Baghdad is laying down arms and singing "Kumbaya." And the ending - MY GOD, the ending - but I'll get there.

The sad thing is that this could have been a kind of okay film, and maybe even a good one, although it's pretty much impossible to tell. The original director, Oliver Hirschbiegel apparently turned in such a bummer of a movie (if you can believe such a thing of the director of that effervescent, Hitler-themed crowd pleaser Downfall) and so Warner Bros. hired the Wachowskis to "fix" it, and they tossed it at their protégé James McTeigue, and what's left is a complete mishmash of bland action mixed with effectively scary action mixed with decent character moments mixed with cloying character moments.

And a happy ending. You expect it, and indeed the original novel had a happy ending, but you don't have to like it, and you surely don't have to think that it fits (for one thing, it absolutely ruins Nicole Kidman's very best scene by showing that her actions in that moment don't matter).

Every generation gets the Body Snatchers it deserves, I have said, and ours not only treats us like idiots, it assumes we don't want to be scared. Or rather, it makes one colossally awful change to the basic framework of the story that completely torpedoes the uncanny effect of the original(s). Virus, remember? The "pod people" in this film are just sick, in an illness that is compared to both the flu and the cold. And more importantly, they aren't clones. Previously, the story worked because if you fell asleep and turned into one of Them, it wasn't "you" turning into "them" at all - it was a precise replica of your body and your memories, but it wasn't you. You were dead and gone. I assume at least part of this change was made as a sop to less-inane bad science, and perhaps to avoid plot holes like the giant one at the climax of the 1956 film, where a character is "snatched" in complete defiance of that film's rules. But it cheapens this film awfully. You never feel the raw terror of annihilation here, only the inconvenience of a malevolent fit of the sniffles.

There are plenty of well-constructed scenes throughout, with a genuinely threatening tone; one of the directors (I want it to be Hirschbiegel) hit upon a series of jarring flash-forwards to keep us disoriented and off-balance; and the overqualified cast is pretty convincing even if they're not playing recognisable humans (in particular, Kidman hasn't been this interesting to watch in years. Make your own joke). But it all adds up to an insulting movie, a boring movie, a bad movie, and I find myself thinking that by the fourth trip, the well has run dry. Time to desecrate a different classic sci-fi corpse, boys.