Fleeing a barren planet, alien spores drift through space on solar winds and rain down on San Francisco. Biologist Elizabeth Driscoll (Brooke Adams) takes an interest in the spider-like spores as they take over the Bay Area’s plant life and sprout into flowers. The sports obsessed boyfriend she lives with in Alamo Square could care less. Later – as if a Warriors fan didn’t already have problems – the boyfriend begins acting very coldly around Liz.

Colleague Matthew Bennell (Donald Sutherland) assures her there is a rational explanation, and takes her to talk to his friend, a pop psychologist played by Mr. Spock himself, Leonard Nimoy. He’s hearing patients tell him that their spouses aren’t their spouses anymore, and believes the hysteria to be indicative of the decay of the nuclear family.

Meanwhile, weird things are afoot in San Francisco: Bennell’s Chinese dry cleaner tells him that his wife is not his wife, a delirious man runs into the street and warns Bennell and Liz “They’re coming to get you!” before being run over, and Matthew’s friends Jack and Nancy Bellicec (Jeff Goldblum and Veronica Cartwright) encounter a body of some sort laying in the bathhouse they operate.

Nancy deduces that the spores are absorbing the minds of their victims as they sleep, hatching imitations from giant seed pods and disintegrating the original body. The pod people are identical to normal people in appearance, but sustain themselves by operating without feeling. Worse, the Bay Area’s population seems to already be taken over.

Directed by Phillip Kaufman from a superbly adapted screenplay by W.D. Richter, Invasion of the Body Snatchers is the second of three (and counting) film versions of Jack Finney’s ’50s novel. This one is regarded by a surprising number as not only the best of the lot, but one of the key films of the ’70s. The great and powerful film critic Pauline Kael said at the time that “it may be the best film of its kind ever made.”

I’d rank this among the best science fiction films ever made. Don Siegel’s 1956 original was far from a masterpiece, but it laid the groundwork for a critique of any society that strips people of their individuality. This could be an indictment of suburbia, Yuppies, Walmart, you name it. It could probably be remade every dozen years with a different setting.

Kaufman’s quirky version takes place amid rampant paranoia and mistrust of the government following Watergate and focuses on urban alienation. Urban alien nation. That’s great.

The remake is wonderfully cast. Where characters in the original were almost as lifeless as the pod people, here we have brilliant turns by Sutherland as the kooky health inspector, the least popular guy in any restaurant, and Adams as a native San Franciscan genuinely creeped out by the feeling that her city has lost its soul overnight.

Lanky Jeff Goldblum – seen here before he started pumping iron in the ’80s – is great as a nervous aspiring writer, while Veronica Cartwright steals the movie as a bookworm who has an uncanny awareness of her environment and how to survive in it. Leonard Nimoy is also terrific, although he plays another variation on Spock, the voice of logic amid increasingly fantastic events.

Philip Kaufman – who would lend a goofy sensibility to America’s space race with The Right Stuff – fills the film with cockeyed camera angles. The relationship between Sutherland and Adams feels natural, something few sci-fi movies stop to do amid the special effects. The remorse on Sutherland’s face as Adams disintegrates in his arms, replaced by a remorseless pod, isn’t about doing a cool makeup effect, but is truly unsettling.

While the original film had a happy ending tacked on by producers, this was the 1970s, and uplifting the audience was not seen as a going concern. The twist ending here is one of the best ever done. It’s nicely complimented by Kaufman’s decision not to go with a traditional film score. The sounds in the film are just like everything else here – disorienting – while the end credits play with no music at all.

Great cameos: Robert Duvall can be seen as priest on a playground swing. Kevin McCarthy presumably reprises his role from the original, running down the street and yelling at motorists “They’re here!” Don Siegel plays a cabbie, while Jerry Garcia provided the banjo music played by the musician in front of City Hall Park.