In the way that certain baseball games become pitchers' duels, some movies are cutting-room battles. The credited editors on The Invasion are Hans Funck and Joel Negron; the first cut Downfall, the second movies like Man of the House and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning. One is Hirschbiegel's man, the other Joel Silver's. At times, you can actually see their two versions of the film wrestling, as scenes leap forward in time and then suddenly jump back.
At other moments, you sense the stately, almost monochromatic dread of Funck's cut between the sutures of meat-and-potatoes suspense, the nip-and-tuck of the hired plastic surgeon. Who knows what this movie could have been? The Invasion died on the operating-room table, and we're just watching the wake.
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