Apple TV+ review – Invasion is a slow-burn, character drama alien-invasion story
I hate it when a trailer lies about what a show or movie is about, and such was the case for Invasion, which just ended its first season on Apple TV+. The trailers focused heavily on action sequences and Sam Neill, but the show’s action is fairly sparse and Sam Neill is only in the first episode. He’s such a well-known actor that I thought for sure they’d bring him back, even as an alien pod-person maybe by the end of the season. But nope, one-and-done for Alan Grant. It’s almost like they wrote a character for him for the one episode just as a way to help market the show. Really odd.
What Invasion really is is a slow-paced character drama, and the alien invasion plot is more often than not just a framing device for exploring the lives of the characters. If the traditional alien invasion story is like Independence Day where a core group of characters know what’s going on and work to stop the aliens, Invasion is its opposite. Here no one knows what’s going on, many of the characters only have a tertiary role in trying to halt the alien invasion, and you never get the perspective of anyone who would know what’s going on.
The show follows four people/groups: there’s a mother who has just learned her husband has been unfaithful to her. She has to deal with that suddenly fractured relationship while also trying to protect her kids. There’s a Japanese space agency technician whose lover was on a doomed mission to space when the aliens arrived. There’s a U.S. Navy Seal whose squad gets attacked by an alien in the Afghani desert and has to find his way alone back to civilization. Finally, there’s a group of British school children, one of which may posses a key to communicating with the aliens.
Invasion is set in multiple countries all over the world. That paired with the fact that all of the dialog spoken by the Japanese characters is in Japanese with English subtitles really gives the show an international feel. In fact, the show reminds me a lot of the 2019-present War of the Worlds series. That show is a British-French collab and features a lot of both languages. And both shows feature disabled teenagers who have some kind of mental link to the aliens. War of the Worlds is also similarly a slow-boil character drama.
A lot of the space-set stuff in Invasion is really bad. I’ve actually never seen a worse attempt at depicting a “realistic” space vehicle, and the characters keep referring to it as a “capsule” even though it looks more like one of the modules of the International Space Station. There’s also a brief scene in one episode in which an astronaut in space “swims” toward her space ship in the vacuum of space. This, of course, wouldn’t work in real life. That was so bad I mostly tuned out the rest of the episode.
There’s also a scene in one episode in which we see the aforementioned Navy Seal desperately trying to get on the last plane out of Afghanistan while a crowd of desperate civilians try to force their way onto the plane. I know this was written (and probably filmed) months before the real life drama around the U.S. military’s hasty exit from Afghanistan, but that scene was eerily similar to real life events.
It probably took me three episodes to properly calibrate myself away from what the trailer sold the show as over to what the show actually is, but on the whole I actually enjoyed it. Shamier Anderson, who plays the Navy Seal character was far and away the standout performer of the series. All of the parts focusing on him were the best parts of the show. The show also has a really great, sweeping orchestral opening theme tune that I quite like. And the aliens actually look and seem quite alien, a welcome departure from the humans-with-a-bumpy-forehead that we get so much of in science fiction.
Apple has already announced that the show has been renewed for a second season, so we’ll get to see what’s to come after that cliffhanger shot at the end of episode ten.