 "Invasion review: Slow-burn alien attack show that requires patience, but is potentially rewarding")
Language: English
Forget every movie, show or book about aliens you have ever consumed. Now, channel every ounce of your knowledge about our world, and douse it with all the imagination you can muster, to come up with your best guess for what an actual, real-life alien invasion would look and feel like. I will not be surprised if you did not even know where to begin.
What Invasion has going for it is the mood and sense of anticipation it creates. Extraterrestrials are coming, but when? How? Why? This premise, familiar as it is, is also loaded with potential. Created by Simon Kinberg and David Weil, this new Apple Original is a globe-trotting stab at depicting the unwanted arrival of guests from space, through the eyes of disparate (and ‘diverse’) Earthly characters. An immigrant family of four in New York, the parents facing a crisis in their marriage; a small-town sheriff on the cusp of retirement; a schoolboy in London who faces chronic epileptic seizures; a young woman working at Japan’s aerospace agency, parting indefinitely from her astronaut lover; a US Navy SEAL in Afghanistan, running away from his past; each of them gets near-equal attention over the first few episodes, as they deal with their own issues, while also dealing with strange (sometimes violent) occurrences around them that seem beyond reason. Of course, we know from the name and promotional material of the show that aliens are coming. In fact, for the longest time, that is the only way we know, because Invasion spends a lot of time just hanging around its main characters as their upended lives play out. This is both intriguing and frustrating. On the one hand, you may begin to invest in the characters, with the hope that the payoff in the end would be worth it. On the other, you might find yourself attempting Jedi mind-tricks to Force the show into getting on with its plot. (Good luck with that.)
Slow-burn is one thing, but slow-burn with déjà vu is quite another. And that is where Invasion tends to get tedious. Many individual threads of the story will seem familiar. Like the old sheriff John Bell Tyson (Sam Neill), who begins to spot something odd happening in his town. Teens disappear. Birds start behaving weird. A giant crater mysteriously appears in the middle of a field. Or the American soldier (Shamier Anderson) in Afghanistan, behaving exactly the way you would expect a person of that description posted in that place to behave. The only storyline with some genuine freshness is a tender love story set in Japan. Mitsuki Yamato (Shioli Kutsuna) has just said a longing goodbye to her secret lover, an astronaut who is off astronaut-ing.
The show switches between these three and the other two storylines almost at random, as each unfolds at its own sweet pace. Did the makers not trust the audience to get the point? Were they more in love with their characters than they justifiably should have been? Does it all lead to something greater? It is hard to tell. Following it through will probably be that much harder, with the weekly release of the final seven episodes of the first season (the first three were released together on 22 October).
Invasion is likely to be an acquired taste, the kind of show that rewards patience in the long run.
There are tantalising little breadcrumbs strewn throughout to keep you just about interested, as you anxiously wait for the sight of aliens. No cards are revealed when you would want or expect them to be. As the world around them begins to fall apart, the characters make those inexplicable decisions you see movie-folk make when things go south. Most times, the atmosphere of the show makes the goings-on worth sitting through, because you know that at some point, aliens will show up.
What will these ones look like? What do these particular ones want? Our planet’s water? Just general galactic colonialism? Are they here to help, like in Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival ? The anticipation of it all will keep the flame burning. A long-running TV show instinctively seems like a great format to substantially delve into the mythology and world-building that would set a new alien invasion story apart. You can also see why this show takes time to find its rhythm. Different people will have different reactions to extra-terrestrial visitors, something you can never fully explore in an Independence Day or an Arrival. In the longer format, you can put in so much more detail about how the various parts of the world are dealing with unexpected visitors. It is what the creators of the show were going for, obviously. Holding the aliens back for as long as they possibly could may have seemed exciting while putting the show together, but you cannot help wondering if they pushed it a bit too far with all the build-up. I am curious enough to really want to know where all of this is heading. While their individual storylines are inconsistent, most characters on the show give you enough reasons to care about them. But if the existence of future seasons depends on the reactions to this mixed bag first, then that is another unanswered question this show will leave you to deal with for a bit. First three episodes of Invasion are streaming on Apple TV+. New episode drops every Friday.
Pradeep Menon is a Mumbai-based writer and independent filmmaker.
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