Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) - Newspaper Ad

San Francisco Examiner - December 17, 1978

I doubt there was any film that better encapsulated the emotional and intellectual dissonance that occurred as the last vestiges of the counter culture began settling into the banality of middle-aged existence, as the sexual revolution fizzled and cooled, than Philip Kaufman's stellar reimagining of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. George A. Romero's Dawn of the Dead is, arguably, a respectable second. Times and people were changing and, well, what we thought we knew, or what we had taken from granted, turned out to have had all the permanence of a wisp of smoke caught up in a strong breeze.

This is my preferred version of the story. Even though it deviates from Jack Finney's source novel about as much as Stanley Kubrick's adaptation of The Shining deviated from King's novel, I think those deviations are rooted in an unflinching honesty that both cuts and chills to one's very bones. This move is a classic of its kind.