‘Invasion’ misses the mark. The post-9/11 spin on ‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers’ bears the scars of its turbulent production.

Who among us hasn’t gone all glassy-eyed watching a cable network news personality deliver up-to-the-minute coverage of suicide bombings in Iraq, genocide in Darfur and nuclear missile tests in North Korea? For better or worse, tuning out is a matter of psychic survival in today’s America. We can’t spend every second of our waking lives in a state of media-fueled outrage and fear. We can’t all be Glenn Beck.

So what are we? Space aliens? Such is the half-formed thesis in Oliver Hirschbiegel’s “The Invasion,” a post-9/11 spin on “The Invasion of the Body Snatchers” that visibly bears the scars of the unusual distressed circumstances that accompanied its creation. More on that later. Suffice to say, this is one radically uneven piece of mixed-use escapism, functional neither as the pointed American commentary nor enemy-among-us thriller it tries simultaneously to be.

In a performance so emotionally air-brushed it could double as a Paxil commercial, Nicole Kidman (“The Interpreter”) plays Carol Bennell, a Washington, D.C., psychiatrist who spends much of her life in the tuned-out state discussed earlier. Though a loving and competent mother to towheaded son Oliver (Jackson Bond), the divorced Carol has gone a bit coarse. She doesn’t so much as acknowledge the homeless guy in front of her office. A TV news report on Iraq fails to elicit so much as a blink. And when a patient (“The Witches of Eastwick” scene-stealer Veronica Cartwright) lucidly reports strange, coldly alien behavior on the part of her husband, all Carol thinks to do is put her on anti-psychotics.

As if.

Unbeknownst to Carol, there IS an alien invasion afoot - an infectious “endo-spore” ferried to Earth on space- shuttle wreckage and spread by the Typhoid Mary of alien possession: a government bureaucrat (Jeremy Northam) who also happens to be Carol’s ex-husband. The symptoms are obvious. The victims simply stop emoting, replaced by a soothing alien affect - well, soothing save those moments when they vomit their alien spore-virus into our coffee cups.

In the movie’s slyest bit, Carol learns to pass unnoticed among the assimilated only by amplifying her own most glazed-over qualities: “You’re sweating … they don’t do that,” offers a helpful noninfectee. It’s too bad director Hirschbiegel (“Downfall”) wasn’t allowed to continue on this psychological vector.

According to published reports, executive producer Joel Silver locked out the German filmmaker and ordered massive, action-heavy reshoots penned by Larry and Andy Wachowski (“The Matrix”). Despite florid editing and a killer car-chase scene, the denouement - involving Carol’s would-be physician boyfriend (Daniel Craig, cast before his Bond debut) and “Nightmare on Elm Street”-style insomnia suspense - feels both physically and thematically out of whack.

Ironic that a much-remade story about the evils of assimilation should itself meet a similar end.

‘The Invasion’

Stars: Nicole Kidman, Daniel Craig, Jeremy Northam

Behind the scenes: Directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel, from a script by Dave Kajganich

Rated: R for language

Running time: 1 hour, 33 minutes

Grade: C