If you were hoping that the DVD for The Invasion would offer some insight into how one of the most promising sci-fi films of 2007 turned into a worldwide bomb, you're going to have to wait for a special edition that will probably never come. Based on the edition hitting stores next week, you'd never know the fascinating back story behind a remake that switched directors and styles so many times that the film completely lost its identity - kind of ironic for a flick about soulless possession. The aftermath was clear - a gross less than $25 million less than its reported budget worldwide and a critical smashing in the press. The film is likely to find a few friends on DVD, but you don't really need a special feature to see where The Invasion went off the rails. All you have to do is watch the movie.

The Invasion starts promisingly, as you can see the claustrophobic style that director Oliver Hirschbiegel was going for with the fourth take on the legend of The Invasion of the Body Snatchers. A shuttle plummets to Earth and it doesn't come home alone. Pretty soon, a woman (Veronica Cartwright from the great second take on this legend) is sitting in the office of Dr. Carol Burnell (Nicole Kidman), saying "My husband is not my husband." The government calls it a flu, but, before you can say pod people, Carol and her friend Ben Driscoll (Daniel Craig) are on the run from emotionless drones set to turn them into obedient slaves. And that's about where the movie literally falls apart.

You can tell what attracted writer David Kajganich, director Oliver Hirschbiegel and the undeniably great cast in the early scenes, as all of the team play with the fears of the day, including infection from disease and our concern that our neighbor might not be who we think they are. Hirschbiegel shoots everything from low angles and paints the world with such a cold palate that it's not hard to believe that we could slide into emotionless pod people pretty easily. But around the 45-minute mark, it all collapses. The story goes that Joel Silver and the team behind the film didn't like the more intellectual take on the material in Hirschbiegel's first cut, so they brought in The Wachowski Brothers and James McTeigue (V For Vendetta) to do a visual punch-up. They added a few action scenes and a twist ending and the final film feels more bipolar than the poor characters getting body snatched. In one scene, the editors literally cut back and forth between an emotional conversation between Ben and Carol and a bizarre action sequence featuring Ben in a stolen cop car that comes out of nowhere. It's like you're switching channels between alternate universe versions of the same film and it's only interesting as a warning to other producers about what not to do in post-production.

The DVD from Warner Brothers comes with the studio's typically strong audio and video presentation but a disappointing set of special features. The most interesting is a 20-minute look at the history of the Body Snatchers movies and the real-world issues that the film tries to craft into a sci-fi nightmare. The three featurettes are dismally short, all coming in under five minutes. For a film that was clearly so reworked in post-production, it might have been nice to see some deleted scenes or get a glimpse of what the original cut was like. Imagine a producer messing with a first cut, failing at the box office, and then having the guts to at least give that first cut a shot on DVD. That's the special edition of The Invasion that we'd love to be reviewing this week, but, until then, this relatively bare-bones one will have to do.