The Father Thing

The father thing is a reoccurring theme, not only in PK dick, but also in most peoples changing cognitive viewpoint as they grow out of childhood.

There reaches a point in our lives when we see our parents as others do. Just people trying to get on in a complicated world, with all the failings of human frailty. And yeah, its a scary time, and suddenly parents do seem like aliens, but that is to do with ourselves, not our parents. It is us that are changing not them.

The father thing is therefore not about aliens taking over people. That is a theme of other films such as body snatchers, which in itself is a metaphor for the worlds' tangled cold war relations at the time when it was written.

As a tv program the father is thing ok - really nothing special - as a representation of the actual story that it claims it is based on - it - to use common American teenage parlance - sucks.

I don't know how many cold war films were made where invaders took over common folk. "The Invasion of the Body Snatchers" is probably the prototype. This one borrows from that and a host of others, including the series "Stranger Things." Because the character of Charlie is so well drawn, this works. It would seem that the fatal flaw in the aliens is that they need host bodies. Charlie could have been killed at any time, but they wanted to assimilate him. There is good suspense and some interesting kid characters. The closeness of Charlie and his father makes his task so much more dramatic. The cinematography is very good with some quite positive special effects. Greg Kinear as the father is certainly quietly threatening. We can only wonder what will happen next.

I enjoyed this latest entry in the Philip K Dick anthology series even if it was decidedly lighter in tone. This story of young American school-kid Charlie who discovers his beloved, baseball-loving dad has been replaced by a beetle-like alien invader which assumes the host's appearance and memories was like a vaguely Speilberg-ian take on "Home Alone". Convincing his initially reluctant school-chum and said friend's big bully of a brother to help him, they embark on a save-the-world mission in their own backyard as they track down the invading aliens to their incubation pods in a nearby forest.

Like I said, it's shot very much from young Charlie's Shane-like perspective, with lots of subjective camera work, forward tracking shots and low-angle set-ups, while the narrative is laced with the type of humour the likes of Bill and Ted were dispensing several years ago. I especially liked the simple but effective way the boys literally trampled down the alien threat once it became clear to them.

Greg Kinnear is the big name in this one, playing Charlie's dad, but the child actors steal the show in a fun and occasionally funny nod to those films from the 80's and 90's where time-travelling, alien-battling, meddling kids were saving the day.

There is nothing inherently bad about The Father Thing, however there is nothing that notable about it apart from on the surface it tells a similar story to the Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

After a meteor shower, some of the townsfolk in a Chicago suburb seems to have been replaced. A few people notice the strange behaviour. Charlie Cotrell (Jack Gore) has a shared love of baseball with his dad (Greg Kinnear) but then suspects that his dad has been taken over by an alien entity.

Charlie starts an online resistance movement and ropes in other school kids in the town to expose the aliens.

Maybe this story is a parable of kids growing up in a hostile adult world or households that have been split by divorce and the child inherits a substitute father or mother figure.

Playing out like a combination of "Invaders from Mars" and "Invasion of the Body Snatchers", this story centers on a young boy, who, while camping with his father, observes a meteor shower, and later, something much more sinister.

Convinced that more and more people are not who they appear to be, the tension ratchets up as he investigates what's going on with his father and seemingly everyone else.

Nicely done riff on a classic science fiction story.