Graphic source: Wikipedia Public License.
If you plan to see The Invasion, then don't read the following because I'm going to spoil the ending for you. I caught this update from the classic B-movie original and I thought of a better way to end it.
Our heroine, in the update, looks fondly at her beloved while he is still sleeping as the morning news drones out grim statistics of people being killed while she forlornfully listens to the radio drinking her coffee. She is obviously troubled and we are left with the impression that maybe total peace is the path to follow after all.
The peace route, completely restraining people and repressing them though, was what the alien bug offered during the horror of the movie we just experienced.
On the other hand, a better ending is my version.
Our heroine, waking up from a dream filled with the alien special effects bug we saw throughout the film, awakens her. Now, we would be left to wonder, was it all a dream? Or, did what we just saw really happen? We would be left to wonder. And, this would lead to a possible sequel. What are those bugs in her head? Where did they come from? Will they emerge?
To sweeten the pot and add to the mystery, our protagonist's beloved, could be arising from slumber at the same time, but as he gets out of bed he limps. The limp could be from what we had experienced in the movie, our protagonist shot him during the film, or, he may just limp. We don't know.
In any case, this alternative ending would heighten the mystery and add to the tense moments we experienced in the film.
In case one still needs to see the classic original, here is a summary of Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
The theme of the cautionary, politicized film was open to varying interpretations, including paranoia toward the spread of a harmful ideology such as socialistic Communism, or the sweeping mass hysteria of McCarthyism in the 1950s and blacklisting of Hollywood, the spread of an unknown malignancy or virulent germ (read fear of annihilation by 'nuclear war'), or the numbing of our individuality and emotional psyches through conformity and group-think. Yet its main theme was the alien (read 'Communist') dehumanization and take-over of an entire community by large seed pods (found in basements, automobile trunks, a greenhouse, and on a pool table) that replicated and replaced human beings. And it told of the heroic struggle of one helpless but determined man of conscience, a small-town doctor (McCarthy), to vainly combat and quell the deadly, indestructible threat.
Tim Dirks
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