Celluloid Heroes

I’ve never expected metal ships.

Remakes are rarely a good idea. Remakes of classics are even less likely to be a good idea. They rarely improve on the original and more often, to be blunt, they suck. But up with it I’m willing to put if it means that, from time to time, we get a remake like this one, which takes everything that was good about the original and turns it around so it is relevant to the present.

Don Siegel’s 1956 classic took Jack Finney’s original story and fashioned a highly effective tale of Cold War paranoia. The alien pod people, dutifully conformist and seeking to supplant the individualistic Americans, were perfect analogues for communist infiltration, at least to 1950s audiences. Transplanted to the late seventies, we get not a story about infiltration, but of the loss of identity amongst the anonymity of urban life.

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