1990s SF film

[peteryoung]

The Faculty, 1998, USA   DIRECTED BY ROBERT RODRIGUEZ
At an Ohio high school students discover that bodysnatching aliens are taking over, starting with the teachers and then on to themselves. You may have twigged that that's not a noticeably original idea, but that's because it comes from screenwriter Kevin Williamson whose formula at the time seemed to be to revamp time-worn genre plots and have the characters themselves notice the similarities to the fiction. This isn't actually a bad thing, although some reviewers who ought to know better clearly thought The Faculty was nothing more than a rip-off of the Heinlein/Finney type of 'alien possession' stories – it's derivative, certainly, but it's specifically not a homage, more a self-aware continuation of that particular subgenre. It's good to see Elijah Wood in a pre-Frodo role and Josh Hartnett is excellent all-round, in fact the movie is well acted throughout with the right amount of pre-determined quirkiness, the best character being Stokely Mitchell, the female SF-geek student who also knows a bit of genre history (take a bow, Clea DuVall). The Faculty is almost too confident and clever for its own good to be seen as just a sidebar to that Puppet Masters/Body Snatchers theme; while still some distance from being outstanding and even though it was aimed almost exclusively at the Buffy generation, I'd still call this one a success.