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Flashback: Donald Sutherland Is the Everyman Who Faced Down an Alien Invasion
Donald Sutherland faced down alien terror as everyman hero in 'Invasion of the Body Snatchers'
Whatever script you’re working with, it’s unlikely you’d be on the lookout for a mustachioed, soft-spoken, fortysomething man to play a city bureaucrat gradually convinced that everyone around him is being replaced with soulless clones, but it’s this performance by the late Donald Sutherland that makes Invasion of the Body Snatchers(1978) a masterpiece of creeping dread. The movie wouldn’t be so effective had Sutherland immediately leapt into protagonist mode: it’s the way his unruffled understatement slowly gives way to heightened emotion (the very thing that makes him a target of the dead-eyed pod people) that ratchets up the paranoia until the viewer, like Bennell, is studying every face on screen for a flicker of humanity, or the coldness of a parasite. The great irony of this version of the oft-adapted Body Snatchers, steeped in the malaise of the post-hippie era, is that in being the perfectly average everyman, Bennell is a direct threat to the conformity of the hive mind seizing control of the planet.
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