 The largest difference in this version of the story is that it takes place on an Army base in Alabama, unlike a small California town in the original novel and the first adaptation filmed in 1956, or in San Francisco like in the 1978 remake.While the first two films portrayed the tightly organised, conformist "pod society" invading a free civil society, Ferrara's film, according to "Chicago Sun-Times" film critic Roger Ebert, made a connection between "the Army's code of rigid conformity, and the behavior of the pod people, who seem like a logical extension of the same code".