Apple TV+ "Invasion"

[Blackstar]

I am about to post a spoiler-filled review of Apple TV+'s 10-episode show "Invasion." If you don't want it spoiled, don't read the next post.

[Blackstar]

Note: spoilers ahead.



By now there have been so many alien invasion movies and television shows that it is very difficult to produce anything original. But one of the lessons of Apple TV+’s 10-episode Invasion, which just streamed its season finale, is that even efforts to be original don’t necessarily mean it will be good. Invasion is not good. It’s boring, depressing, slow, uneven, and zigged when it should have zagged. If you want to watch it and don’t want to be spoiled, then don’t read any further.

The alien invasion genre has often suffered from an inherent flaw in the premise: any alien species advanced enough to travel through space and take over the Earth is going to be too difficult for humans to defeat. In H.G. Welles’ War of the Worlds, the author solved this by having germs kill the Martians. Numerous other stories have adopted a variation of that solution, most notably 1996’s Independence Day wiping out the aliens with a computer virus. But the conundrum is always there: if the aliens are all-powerful, the humans are weak and ineffective, and the logical conclusion is that the best the humans can hope to do is survive, not win.

Survival has been the theme of several recent alien invasion television shows. Falling Skies, which ran from 2011-2015, was about survivors of an invasion that had devastated much of the Earth. Colony, which ran from 2016-2018, was about the few remaining humans living in Los Angeles, which had been walled in by aliens who were building a weapon on the Moon. Even though both shows started with a logical assumption that the humans could not defeat the invaders, neither knew what to do with that premise other than to have the scrappy survivors keep on hiding and fleeing and occasionally fighting.

Invasion’s one attempt at originality is to keep the aliens off-screen for much of the show. We don’t get a decent look at an alien until the sixth episode, which is essentially an homage to the farmhouse scene from the 1953 (or 2005) movie The War of the Worlds, where an alien prowls around a rural house as its inhabitants try to hide. Even when we do get to see an alien they are dark and amorphous, sort of like a big black trash bag with spikes. The invasion, and its aliens, barely appear in a show about an alien invasion.

Instead, the show follows around several characters and their cohorts who are scattered around the globe and seem to be far away from the actual invasion. We follow Trevante, a Navy SEAL in Afghanistan who is one of the first people to encounter the aliens, but it happens in a dust storm where he sees little as his team is wiped out. We also follow Aneesha, a mother and wife living outside of New York City who flees with her family after an attack. There is also Mitsuki Yamato, a flight controller for a Japanese space station mission whose girlfriend is apparently killed in space when an invisible alien craft collides with it. And finally, there is Casper Morrow, a British schoolboy whose bus goes over a cliff in the wilderness while on a field trip.

There is a name missing from that list: Sheriff Tyson, played by Sam Neill, the only recognizable actor in the bunch. Neill featured prominently in the trailer, but in a rather maddening bait and switch, his character is killed at the end of the first episode. One gets the sense that after many of the episodes were filmed, Apple execs told the producers that they needed at least one recognizable actor in the cast to capture attention, so Neill was added in a storyline that goes nowhere and then abruptly ends. This also is rather symbolic of the rest of the series, which frequently heads down blind alleys and then stops, or promises things it fails to deliver: very little Sam Neill, very few aliens, almost no action.

What all of the characters have in common is that they’re morose and depressed. Trevante is depressed about past trauma (we only find out near the end of the series). Aneesha is depressed about her cheating husband and her life-choices (she gave up being a doctor to have a family). Mitsuki is depressed about her dead girlfriend. And teenage Casper suffers epileptic seizures and has been bullied and ridiculed his whole life.

Watching a bunch of brooding people mope through an alien invasion we never get to see does not make for riveting television. It’s hard to care about any of these people. They all demonstrate determination and strength that helps them to survive, but they’re just not inspiring or interesting. The one exception is Casper, whose innate bravery and strength of character emerge as things get worse.

The writers clearly decided that they wanted a slow-burn mystery rather than a rah-rah explosion-filled Independence Day-like action show. That’s obviously why they kept the aliens off-screen for so long. But as the show progressed, it became almost grating. Why are we following around these people, when much more exciting stuff is obviously happening elsewhere to more interesting and less damaged people? At least part of the answer is that anybody who encounters an alien dies. Bullets don’t work against them, projectiles and fire don’t work against them, they can regenerate from almost any damage. So our characters are really only alive primarily because they haven’t run into the aliens, yet. But they remain clueless and uninvolved for so long that they appear stupid.

Something that is hinted early on but is never fully resolved is the idea that each of these characters is somehow key to understanding and maybe defeating the aliens. That gets dropped for a couple of them – Trevante and Aneesha don’t really do anything of value – and it remains a bit mysterious for Mitsuki and Casper. Mitsuki is convinced that her girlfriend is not really dead, and her attempts to communicate with her in space enable the American military to target the alien spaceship and nuke it, which results in all the aliens on Earth falling dead. Casper’s seizures have resulted in him having visions of the invasion before it happened, and seeing events that he had no knowledge of, scenes that he has recreated in a creepy notebook filled with scribbling. It turns out that he can somehow mentally connect with the aliens and see what they see, possibly even controlling them.

All of this comes to a head in the ninth episode, which finally results in the aliens being defeated as their mostly-unseen giant ship is blasted in space. But there was a tenth episode, and anybody who has watched a few movies knows what is coming. We all know that no matter how many times Jason or Michael or the extraterrestrial is stabbed, burned, or blown up in a nuclear fireball the size of Montana, he/it is going to come back one last time. And since this is a series, we know that the last episode will end with a cliffhanger, and we know exactly what that will be – the aliens are not really dead, the aliens come back.

One of the last scenes, filmed as expected in the most boring way possible, shows some scientists going into a crashed alien spaceship in the Amazon jungle. They shine their flashlights around and notice that something is moving behind the walls – no surprise, the aliens are not really dead. The show then cuts to another character looking at a piece of alien stuff, and it starts to ripple on its surface, something we have seen happen before.

The final scene is Trevante standing on a southern California beach looking out to sea and noticing a giant spaceship in the sky. It looks different than the glimpses we’ve gotten of the other alien ship, much more horizontal and shiny than the black, spikey ship crashed in the jungle. Is it the main aliens coming back, or their adversaries? Or their masters? Is it the mothership? Can we get Will Smith and Jeff Goldblum to fly up to it with a virus and a nuclear bomb? Or will everybody continue to mope around and do little more than hide?

After ten episodes of a dull, boring slog, why would anybody care about this totally predictable not-really-shocking conclusion? But bizarrely, on December 8, Apple TV+ renewed the show for a second season. Apple is worth a trillion dollars. They can afford to throw away hundreds of millions on boring television and it won’t even show up on their spreadsheet.

Invasion was boring. Fortunately, Apple will soon premier season 3 of For All Mankind. This time, the humans invade Mars.

[saturnsky]

I agree,,,,very boring early on, but last two episodes provided some interesting developments,,,,will see what happens in season 2...and Im looking forward to Season3 of For all Mankind,,,,

[Blackstar]

but last two episodes provided some interesting developments

I thought the interesting stuff happened in episode 9. Episode 10 was a bit predictable. It was also really slow. One of my many problems with this show was the scenes that did nothing to advance the plot. For instance, in the last episode we see Trevante talking to a US embassy person in London. There is nothing that comes out of that scene, and in fact it illustrated another problem with the show where people often seemed to be voicing lines of dialogue rather than talking back and forth. Rewatch that scene--watch it with the captions on--and you'll see that the two men don't really answer each others' questions, they just talk. That was followed by a scene of Trevante on an airplane heading home. A few episodes earlier we were told that pretty much every jet that flew across the Atlantic was destroyed. So it's kinda surprising that a couple of days after the aliens are defeated (snort) he's on an airplane. Everything was back up and working really quickly, huh?

Episode 9 brought things to a head, and perhaps the most interesting question was if it was Casper who stopped the aliens or the nukes. I don't think the writers have any idea. They were just throwing stuff at the wall.

But there are all kinds of plot lines that never went anywhere. In the first episode all the kids in the school got nose bleeds except for Aneesha's son. We're led to believe that he's special. And then the only other "special" thing he does in the entire series is find the alien rock. That's it. He does nothing else. That plot line vanished, just like the sheriff's plot line vanished.

[libra]

There is a name missing from that list: Sheriff Tyson, played by Sam Neill, the only recognizable actor in the bunch. Neill featured prominently in the trailer, but in a rather maddening bait and switch, his character is killed at the end of the first episode.

One gets the sense that after many of the episodes were filmed, Apple execs told the producers that they needed at least one recognizable actor in the cast to capture attention, so Neill was added in a storyline that goes nowhere and then abruptly ends. This also is rather symbolic of the rest of the series, which frequently heads down blind alleys and then stops, or promises things it fails to deliver: very little Sam Neill, very few aliens, almost no action.

https://getyarn.io/yarn-find?text=%22Jurassic%20Park%20III%20%282001%29%22&p=32
https://getyarn.io/yarn-find?text=%22Jurassic%20Park%20III%20%282001%29%22&p=33

"Some of the worst Apple TV+ shows imaginable, have been done with the best intentions..."

[Malatrope]

What struck me about this series was that the writers (and directors, and producers) have created a work with a complete absence of any story. The characters all move around and emote, collated into a hot mess that is just a collection of barely-connected scenes. There may a vague narrative about an alien invasion going on, but we could have figured that out by the title. The completely self-absorbed characters appear mostly uninterested.

Is this what happens when we teach our children "feelings, only feelings"? This is "Aliens vs. Predator", without the aliens, and without the predator. They thought about doing "Lord of the Flies" for awhile, but forgot the lord and couldn't find any flies.

These people live in their lizard brain, without any higher functions. Avoid at all costs.

[Jeff Lerner]

Don’t have much to add except I stopped watching after 3 episodes…this was awful, painful to watch…can’t believe they renewed it…

[Oersted]

Blackstar, thank you so much for the effort you put into this write-up and thank you for saving me some time! I won't watch it.

[Blackstar]

Don’t have much to add except I stopped watching after 3 episodes…

I was bored by the first episode and forced myself to watch the second one. After that, I skimmed through the rest of the episodes, pausing to watch a few scenes here and there. The flight controller's story was really pretty dull. The only story that held any interest for me was the British boy--everything about him indicated he was a loser, but he demonstrated a real strength that grew over time. I watched episode 9 all the way through and was surprised/disappointed that even by that time they still had not picked up the pace. The actual attack on the aliens, like so much else in this show, took place off-screen.

I don't understand why they renewed it either.

[Blackstar]

What struck me about this series was that the writers (and directors, and producers) have created a work with a complete absence of any story. The characters all move around and emote, collated into a hot mess that is just a collection of barely-connected scenes.

I saw many problems with the basic storytelling. As you note, the scenes are not really connected. That is true on several levels. The individual group segments are not connected--Trevante is wandering around Afghanistan and it has nothing to do with what is happening with Aneesha or with Casper or Michiko. Their individual stories have nothing to do with each other. It is only in the 9th episode that two of the stories connect.

But the individual group scenes often had little connection from scene to scene. What did we get from Aneesha's wandering through the woods of Long Island? The family headed out, hid, moved around a bit, hid, and in the end, nothing really happened other than her husband dying in a pretty obvious manner (as soon as we learned early on that he was cheating on her, it wasn't surprising that he would have a redemption arc). Was there any point to her storyline? Maybe the point was that she was stronger at the end than at the beginning, but that was not much.

We had big warnings about this disconnectedness in the first episode. I noticed that there was no coherent time--in one scene it was morning in Idaho and the next scene it was morning in Tokyo, and then it was noon in Idaho. The editing was a confusing jumble, indicating that the scenes were not necessarily happening in sequence, and that the writers and editors were not trying to tell a coherent storyline.

[Blackstar]

Okay, to answer an obvious question: if it was so bad, why did I watch (some of) it? It was more of an academic interest to me. I've watched a lot of alien invasion movies and TV shows over the years and I'm always interested to see if somebody does something new. I thought that Arrival was great, and even Annihilation was interesting. Colony had a strong premise (it was retelling the 1980s TV miniseries V, which was an analogy for Nazis and collaborationists) but the writers didn't know where to go with it. So I watched Invasion hoping that they had something new.

But they didn't really have anything new. I think they thought that the new part of their premise was to just show people who were trying to survive rather than trying to fight the aliens. But as I noted in my review, if you start with the premise that there are all-powerful aliens, you've written yourself into a corner that is hard to get out of. Invasion established that if you encounter an alien, you die. So at that point, these characters can only keep going on by never encountering the aliens. And that made for some pretty boring storytelling.

Plus, why did they all have to be such depressing people? It's hard to flee aliens when you're carrying so much emotional baggage.

[libra]

Plus, why did they all have to be such depressing people?

As much as I loath Independance day (manichean and jingoistic past 11, meh) - I have to say that the scene where an angry, cigare-chomping Will Smith punch the Alien in the face, saying "Now THAT's a close encounter of the third kind" was funny as hell

In fact alien movies would need more Ian Malcolm characters. Now that was a funny and silly character.

Arrival was great. Brilliant movie.

[Blackstar]

Plus, why did they all have to be such depressing people?

As much as I loath Independance day (manichean and jingoistic past 11, meh) - I have to say that the scene where an angry, cigare-chomping Will Smith punch the Alien in the face, saying "Now THAT's a close encounter of the third kind" was funny as hell

His "Welcome to Earf!"* punch was one of the best scenes.

But there's gotta be some happy medium between a cocky Will Smith fighter jock punching aliens and a family of depressed people wandering around the woods of New York. Heck, even the Navy SEAL in this show was depressed.







*For those who don't know, for many years a somewhat badly-reproduced version of Independence Day was showing on cable TV and it always sounded like he said "Earf!" instead of "Earth!" when he punched the alien. I think that eventually became a meme. The audio was eventually fixed.




Update rather than a new post: I grabbed two shots of the alien ships. One shows the ship crashed in the Amazon. The other is the ship that shows up in the very last scene.

I looked at some recaps of the last episode of season 1 and they were both very badly written. I have not seen any decently-written reviews of this show. I'm guessing that the good writers decided to review good shows.

Me, I'm a glutton for punishment.

[Blackstar]

Season 2. The show was dumb.

[Oersted]

Looks like a mash-up of every sci-fi trope of the last couple of decades...

[Blackstar]

https://www.ign.com/articles/invasion-season-2-review

The reviewer says that S2 is better than S1. But... well, by mentioning the problems with S1, they are not convincing me to watch S2.

A few days ago I saw somebody state that plot is the least important aspect of a good TV show, and that characters are the most important. And while I understand what they were trying to say, I also thought it was rather ridiculous. We cannot just have all characters and ignore the story. And that's what S1 did, spending all its time on a bunch of mopey people dealing with their emotional baggage while there was an alien invasion going on in the background. I don't think we saw an alien until around the 6th or 7th episode (and even then we didn't get a good look at them). The contrast was just too much, because it seemed like maybe the end of the world was a bit more important than the fact that some woman's marriage was falling apart and maybe that should be the focus of the story.

And I'll admit that I had a bad taste in my mouth after the Sam Neill bait-and-switch where the commercials showed us a familiar, likeable actor in the show, and he was dead by the first episode.

Anyway, I'm not going to watch this. But I'm inclined to just jump to the last episode of S2 to see what happens with the aliens.

[CameronD]

And I'll admit that I had a bad taste in my mouth after the Sam Neill bait-and-switch where the commercials showed us a familiar, likeable actor in the show, and he was dead by the first episode.

Given it's common for series producers to spend a bit more effort on the pilot episode, perhaps he quit after hearing the direction the show was going?  After all, unlike the rest of the cast, he does have a reputation to uphold.

[sanman]

And I'll admit that I had a bad taste in my mouth after the Sam Neill bait-and-switch where the commercials showed us a familiar, likeable actor in the show, and he was dead by the first episode.

Given it's common for series producers to spend a bit more effort on the pilot episode, perhaps he quit after hearing the direction the show was going?  After all, unlike the rest of the cast, he does have a reputation to uphold.

I think it's become part of the formula/strategy to hire the big-name star to elevate the stature of the show and lure you in as a viewer, even while paying them a hefty pricetag. And then of course after they've served their purpose, they're deliberately killed off or sent away or whatever, to lighten the budgetary load.
Game of Thrones(Sean Bean)
Westworld(Sir Anthony Hopkins)
The Boys(Elizabeth Shue)
etc
Even The Expanse had a cameo from Jonathan Banks in the first episode as the wigged out captain.

[Blackstar]

I think it's become part of the formula/strategy to hire the big-name star to elevate the stature of the show and lure you in as a viewer, even while paying them a hefty pricetag. And then of course after they've served their purpose, they're deliberately killed off or sent away or whatever, to lighten the budgetary load.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure that it was this. I am guessing that at some point in the early phases, either the producers decided "We need a recognizable star to sell this to a streaming network" or the network told them that they needed a recognizable star. So they got Neill with the intention of using him in the promos. They only had to pay him for one episode, but they got all that advertising value out of him. And although it's been a long time since I watched that episode, I remember both that the way they treated the character was annoying (like everybody else in the series he is mopey) and then I was shocked/annoyed when they just unceremoniously killed him at the end. However, it was consistent with their theme of there's an alien invasion, but few people know what is going on and we're not really going to show you the aliens. And that was one of the things that really bugged me about this show--they thought they had a clever premise, but it was really an annoying premise. After all, it's an alien invasion show, so there should be aliens.

Invasion went with a very international cast, which I'm guessing was part of their financing and marketing. But they needed at least one recognizable movie star.

Game of Thrones(Sean Bean)

Bean has long had a reputation of getting killed in his movies, so this was just par for the course. But those are good examples.

[Jeff Lerner]

I gave up watching season 1 after 3 episodes…it was soooo boring…but after reading that season 2 finally brings on the aliens, I watched S2 episode 1…or tried to…I gave up 3/4 of the way through.