The Invasion is about an intelligent alien bacteria that modifies the essential nature of humanity without changing its physical nature. The Invasion attempts to teach us something about our essential nature but instead teaches us about our nature to be suckered into a dull movie.

A shuttle crash brings with it an alien parasite that enters the human population. Dr. Carol Benell (Nicole Kidman) is thrown in the middle of the outbreak when her ex-husband, a doctor for the Center for Disease Control, Tucker Kaufman (Jeremy Northam) visits their son, Oliver (Jackson Bond) While Oliver is visiting his father, he and Carol get separated and Carol has to try to find him in the middle of the outbreak. Her and her colleague, Ben Driscoll, (Daniel Craig) set out to find him. The only way to move through the ever transforming sea of the infected unnoticed is to pretend that you have no emotions.

The first twenty minutes of the movie is director Oliver Hirschbiegel's attempt at showing how emotional, individual, and human we all are in our everyday lives. On her walk to work, Carol is confronted by examples of emotions running wild in the street. Women are crying, loud conversations come from men shouting into their cell phones and there are obvious acts of love between mother and child. There are so many acts of emotion that you wonder if they let the mental patients out of the hospital. It gets nauseatingly obvious that Hirschbiegel is trying to make a point, he might as well have used giant red pen.

As The Invasion progresses, you can identify those poor saps who have contracted alienococcus by the deadpan looks on their faces. Their inability to exhibit basic human emotion is obviously supposed to be frightening. Not a single actor in the movie, except Jeremy Northam, can muster the stone faced, emotional façade to make the rigid roboticism feel realistic or petrifying. The majority of The Invasion has at least one person attempting stoicism and their acting disabilities left the movie infirmed, debilitated and crying out for cinematic medical attention! Nicole Kidman left me looking for a paramedic.