Author: Bryan Loomis
Don't Look Up was a terrible movie, but one of the things it attempted is actually among the most appealing tools of cinema, that that's the use of allegory. Allegory is a coarse tool, a hammer with which to get your point across; but for some points and some themes, a coarse tool is best. You just have to make damn sure if you're gonna smash down a hammer that you're swinging at the right thing, and with the right technique.
The technique is really where Don't Look Up failed - it was trying to take on climate change denialism, a worthy topic, but it did so with a level of smarminess that made it pretty critically despised even among critics who generally agreed with its message. But with one of my very favorite films, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the hammer is swung at the right thing and with the perfect technique.
I first encountered Invasion of the Body Snatchers in late college. I'd become interested in early sci fi through a stray purchase of a DVD box set of a 60s TV show called The Outer Limits, which led me to The Twilight Zone, which led me to some Old Hollywood sci fi like this one and The Day the Earth Stood Still. I'd previously despised "message movies", preferring art that made me feel more deeply in ways difficult to explain rather than something that could, in my view, be summarized in a sentence or two. Still, there was something oddly compelling about Rod Serling coming out and telling you exactly what the point was. The allegory somehow enhanced the point, made it more true.
For Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the allegory is pretty simple: getting swept up into conformity and groupthink, and losing your soul in the process. Most pressing for the era, likely, was the groupthink of McCarthyism. But the genius of the movie is how it flips the paranoia of the McCarthyites to paranoia about becoming a McCarthyite. Miles running in the street, all his friends replaced, screaming to anyone that will listen that they're coming for you too, is an indelible image that's been burned into my brain.
There's a whole lot of clumsy expository dialogue here, which I usually hate, but here it just has this b-movie kind of charm. It isn't exactly "show don't tell", but it's very much "show and then tell" - before we get the over-explaining we often get a very striking image of the pods, or a blank human face. The images are what stick with me - Miles stabbing from above with the pitchfork, or the wriggling pods growing a replacement human.
There's been a lot written about the framing device, which was shoehorned in at the studio's request and is indeed bad. It basically gives the story a hopeful, or at least less doom and gloom, ending. I don't find it that difficult to just ignore. When you leave the theater, the things that stick with you are the moments when Miles realizes that Becky has been turned, and Miles' desperate ranting on the highway. It's sort of like the ending of Get Out - once you have that police siren moment, it clears the way for a happier resolution, while still getting its point across.
The other thing that sticks out is how economical the movie is. There are no side plots of note, the invasion develops rather quickly, and then you're just in pure thriller/escape mode in the back half. I love long movies that need to be long, and short movies that need to be short. This movie doesn't need anything else.
So to me, this movie is pretty much perfect. Many of my favorite movies expanded the bounds of what I considered good, or did something that I didn't know to that point that a movie could do. This one was probably the first Old Hollywood movie I had loved after It's a Wonderful Life, and perhaps Casablanca. Along with that, it showed me that a movie can pretty much show you all its cards very explicitly and still be wonderful.
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