![]() ![]() ![]() Invasion is a ten-hour season devoid of nearly all humor, where characters across the globe continually bumble around in their own misery, resentful that aliens keep interrupting their tragic lives. And it seems totally reasonable that there’d be a series of occasionally provocative discoveries about the aliens, but because of international distrust and the collapse of global communications, no one would ever connect the dots into a coherent concept of alien infrastructure.īut the fun of turning that over in your mind as a narrative experiment feels very different when it becomes an actual television show. Maybe it would be very difficult to see past the pain of your relationship with your semi-estranged wife in order to give your full attention to the end of humanity. Maybe you would continue to care way, way more about your husband cheating on you than the aliens destroying the planet. It seems totally possible that if aliens did start wreaking mysterious widespread havoc, the individual experience of that event would be confusing, vague, and frustratingly short on any details about what the hell was going on. You could even argue there’s some realism to it. Intellectually, there is some appeal to the idea of an alien apocalypse story where none of the individual players ever really know what’s happening, there is little to no attempt at some higher-level summary of what aliens are doing to the world, and petty personal problems continually eclipse the urgency of human extinction. From a generous point of view, this is a daring and unexpected stance for a show called Invasion. What slowly dawns on you as Invasion continues, though, is that the story this show wants to tell has remarkably little to do with the alien invasion of Earth that is killing untold thousands (millions?) of people. Here is a story about an important Japanese space launch, definitely not destined to be derailed by any sort of alien interference, no sir. Here is the guy in a desert in Yemen, drawn to a mysterious funneling in the sand. Invasion hits these beats with lumbering competence. Later that day, all the kids in music class - all except her son - will spontaneously experience intense nosebleeds. But wait - what’s that inexplicable circle out in the cornfield, and why are the crows acting so strangely? Meanwhile, somewhere on Long Island, a harried suburban housewife played by Golshifteh Farahani runs on a treadmill and packs school lunches. He wonders what life will look like now that he’s no longer on the force. Sam Neill plays a small-town sheriff heading out for his last day on the job before retirement. The first episode of Invasion, the new aliens-attack-Earth series premiering today on Apple TV+, gives you the impression that it will be a fairly rote entry in the genre of Devastating Alien Crisis Inspires Global Panic and Individual Resiliency. ![]()
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