When word dropped on Thursday that Donald Sutherland had passed away , I’m sure many sci-fi fans of a certain age immediately thought of the actor’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers remake from 1978 – and more specifically, the iconic closing shot from the film which freaked out so many of us, so badly, for so long. Sutherland had a long and incredible career, but that final shot of him pod-person-screeching and pointing directly into the camera was just the amazingly disturbing capper to what remains one of the great sci-fi/horror films of all time. A remake, of course, of the 1956 Cold War metaphor of the same name, director Philip Kaufman’s 1978 Body Snatchers takes the original’s “the Commies are here already !” analogy and flips it, putting a decidedly New Age spin on the idea of everyone around you turning into someone, or something, else .
This time though it’s not that the Reds are coming for us. No, instead it’s simply that we gave up on ourselves. The actor had acquired something of an anti-establishment persona in the years prior to this film, not only through his real-life anti-war activities during Vietnam (at one point he made a sort of bizzaro-USO tour documentary with Jane Fonda, the queen of counter-culture Hollywood), but also because some of his best-known roles fell into that niche, from playing one of the Dirty Dozen in the film of the same name, to the original Hawkeye in Robert Altman's M*A*S*H, and as Sergeant Oddball, who joins with a .