THE INVASION — ★ ★ ½ — Nicole Kidman, Daniel Craig, Jeremy Northam, Jeffrey Wright, Malim Akerman; rated PG-13 (profanity)

The United States leaves Iraq. North Korea renounces nuclear weapons. Darfur is saved. Hunger, poverty, war and crime come to an end. It's on TV and in all the papers.

But the dogs know something is up. They growl. That's why the nice, mild-mannered folks who do most of their talking, and all of their living, without changing their facial expressions, losing their temper or getting excited, start wringing the animals' necks.

"The Invasion" is a perfectly watchable, agreeably paranoid remake of that most paranoid of last-humans-on-Earth contagion movies, "Invasion of the Body Snatchers." But coming as it does after "28 Days Later," "28 Weeks Later," "Dawn of the Dead" and the like — and just ahead of Will Smith's December "I Am Legend" — it can seem quaint, not quite state-of-the-art.

Not the fault of the cast, though. Oscar-winner Nicole Kidman stars as a Carol, a psychiatrist who starts to notice everyone seems "a little disconnected." Not just those she's medicating, either. And it all started when the Space Shuttle Patriot crashed.

People have seizures in the streets. Hysterics run up to her car shrieking "We've got to warn people!"

"No sleep, no sleep, no sleep," a woman mutters as she runs, avoiding eye contact with all the suits walking the crowded streets of Washington.

Everything is working. The trains are running. The government keeps saying "It's the flu." Her ex-husband (Jeremy Northam), a honcho with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, keeps that message out there. Calmly. In the flat intonations of the brainwashed.

Carol is hesitant about letting their son, Oliver (Jackson Bond), go visit. But you know the courts and visitation rights.

"Something's wrong with my dad," Oliver texts her.

"My husband is not my husband," a patient (Veronica Cartwright of "The Right Stuff" and "Alien") insists. Carol, the doctor-beau she keeps at arm's length (Daniel Craig), and the beau's researcher-pal (Jeffrey Wright) start to put it all together.

Whatever you do, they realize, don't fall asleep. That's when the disease takes root and takes over.

The timing of "The Invasion" would seem right, with the nation running through one of its periodic paranoid fits. Earlier versions came out during the McCarthy-ite Red Scare of the 1950s and the Watergate/Nixon-is-spying-on-us-all 1970s. But the script doesn't find ways to comment on our fearful times.

Promising ideas about a mass single-cell organism and a cell-phone-connected culture float on the outskirts of the plot — it feels like a film cut down from a longer, probably no better movie. Kidman's performance has a rising fierceness that isn't helped by the truncated length.