Nicole Kidman in "The Invasion"

It’s probably foolish to infer Nicole Kidman’s views on psychiatry from The Invasion, the third remake of Don Siegel’s tightly constructed 1956 sci-fi thriller Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Nor is it clear that the film itself, about a mass alien viral infection of humans and transformation of their psychology, has any such ideas. Still, it’s hard to resist some personalistic (i.e., catty) speculation, particularly as there’s so little else to engage the imagination in the movie.

Kidman plays Dr. Carol Bennell, a Washington psychotherapist with a patient who believes her husband has inexplicably and frighteningly changed into someone else, a calmly disengaged, utterly different person in the same body. Bennell has her own spousal problems. Her ex-husband (Jeremy Northram) is demanding visitation access to their son after several years of neglect. He too has become rather disturbingly imperturbable. On Halloween she notices the odd behavior of a neighbor’s young son: As his friends paw excitedly through their confectionary stashes, he sits stone-faced, arranging the contents of his bag on a table like chess pieces.

In Phillip Kaufman’s 1978 version, Leonard Nimoy is a smugly clueless upscale shrink who tells a woman that what she sees as her lover’s radical personality change is only a sign of her own disenchantment with the guy.

It’s unlikely that Dr. Bennell’s experiences in The Invasion are supposed to have any similar humorous or ironic thrust. The movie is pretty humorless in tone and at least a little grandiose, in the current fashion.

Kidman used to be a Scientologist, and that organization has a famously disapproving posture toward psychiatry, but probably none of the movie reflects her personal, post-Scientology attitude. Still, when Dr. Bennell’s ex says rhetorically, “You give people pills to make them feel better. How is that different from what we’re doing?” it’s hard not to hear the voice of Kidman’s own ex, the belligerently anti-therapy Tom Cruise.

In Siegel’s film, and in the 1955 Jack Finney novel on which it was based, alien seed pods turn up in a small American town, replicating its residents while they sleep and killing them in the process. In the 1950s Red Scare era, this narrative had a more unsettling impact on audiences’ imaginations than most popular art. Siegel’s movie built to its lonely hero’s realization of this quiet onslaught cooly and carefully.

In this new version, viral spores from outer space spray earthlings when a returning space shuttle explodes in the atmosphere. We are plunged into the invasion’s infectious progress almost immediately. As in the earlier versions (Abel Ferrara’s 1993 Body Snatchers was the most recent) the new “human” is a pacified, passionless replicant.

This Invasion doesn’t engage one imaginatively, on the same kind of metaphorical plane, as the first two versions did. Part of this is because in those movies the pods’ production of human duplicates and several of the characters’ horror-ridden confrontations with their own nearly complete, unnatural duplicates had an impact that infectious spores don’t permit. There are several creepy scenes and incidents in The Invasion, but even these are vitiated by the direction. (Though the film is credited to Oliver Hirschbieger (Downfall), the film was also reputedly worked on by the Wachowski Brothers (Matrix) and James McTeigue (V for Vendetta).)

The over-pumped approach to the material plunges us into the action without enough prepping. It’s edited in a hyper-jumpy mode, somewhat like a two-blade-wielding grill chef at a Japanese steakhouse. There’s not enough inflection and variation of emphases. Confusing things further is a chronology-interrupting device, whizzing into and out of snippets of future action. The film works against itself as it tries to build suspense and action at the same time.

It doesn’t help that the script is laden with lunk-headed dialogue. There’s a strange, undeveloped Stepford Wives-like interjection in which Dr. Bennell’s ex-husband attributes their divorce to her failure to make him, rather than her work or child, the prime priority. A problem that won’t arise in the new order, presumably.

Whether or not any new interpretation of this old story could capture anxieties and unconscious fears in our era the way at least two of the previous versions did, this movie isn’t up to that challenge.