Apple TV+ keeps launching big-budget dramas in the hope that one of them will take hold of viewers with the same strength as its Emmy-winning “Ted Lasso.” This year alone, there have been massive, star-studded productions like “The Mosquito Coast” and “Lisey’s Story,” and the general response from the populous has been a shrug. The charming football coach may have brought people to the streaming service, but it feels like the company is racking up more misses than hits lately, which is probably leading to some late nights in Apple boardrooms. That’s where someone came up with “Invasion.”
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“Invasion” is a Prestige TV era take on a visitation of Earth by hostile entities, imagining the alien-led end of the world from different vantage points across the planet. It’s “War of the Worlds” for the “Serious TV Viewer,” but it never feels like it’s actually engaging with its concept beyond its pitch. It’s a show that is so consistently self-aware of its perceived importance as dramatic television, so shockingly humorless and flat in terms of character/plot, and so fragmented in its storytelling that viewers will just hope the aliens finally land to get these people to stop talking.
More “Arrival” than “Independence Day” (all the way down to its Max Richter score), “Invasion” takes place across four continents simultaneously. Its ambition to tell a sci-fi story that isn’t driven by the while male POV is perhaps its most distinguishing asset even if the structure often drains the momentum—the best episode, Chapter 6, focuses on only one arc and the show might have been better served by spending more time in each subplot instead of jumping between them. The show falters the most when the editing can’t keep the threads tied.
Creators Simon Kinberg (writer of “Sherlock Holmes” and a few “X-Men” sequels) and David Weil (Amazon Prime Video’s “Hunters” and “Solos”) do make sure that each of the major characters strikes a different chord in terms of perspective and identity. For example, a grief-stricken soldier leads one, a troubled child another, and a smalltown sheriff yet another. And yet, they never seem to blend together to tell one story (at least until a few of them literally intersect). It’s a challenge to tell a story across this broad of a canvas that feels like a coherent whole, and the biggest flaw of “Invasion” is how much it misses that mark.
It starts in the Midwest with a lawman named Jim Bell Tyson (Sam Neill), nearing the end of his career as the planet nears the end of its existence. He’s one of the first people to sense there’s something amiss out there that’s more than just the meth problem in his community, but he’s then sidelined once the main story gets underway and it’s much to the show’s detriment as Neill feels like he would have remembered to make “Invasion” fun.
The arguable lead here, at least for the first half of the season, goes to the charismatic Golshifteh Farahani (“Paterson”) as Aneesha Malik, a Syrian immigrant who gave up her dreams of becoming a doctor to make a home for her husband Ahmed (Firas Nassar) and two kids, Luke (Azhy Robertson) and Sarah (Tara Moayedi). Aneesha discovers something heartbreaking about Ahmed in the premiere but is forced to align with him as the world falls apart around them. Farahani is solid and one wishes the material more often rose to her talent level.
Across the globe, American Navy Seal Trevante Ward (a potential future star in Shamier Anderson) is stationed in Afghanistan, where things get very weird. Some of the Weta Digital-designed special effects in this segment are among the show’s most captivating (although the creature design later in the series feels uninspired). Still, there’s something to Trevante’s arc of a strong man already in a dangerous place that becomes completely unhinged that’s interesting for a few episodes, and Anderson never falters.
Less effective is the arc of Mitsuki Yamato (Shioli Kutsana), a mission control scientist in Japan who is hiding an affair with one of the country’s top astronauts, Hinata Murai (Rinko Kikuchi). When her Major Tom doesn’t come home, Mistuki is one of the first to really figure out what happened to her, and what may soon happen to everyone else.
Finally, there’s Casper Morrow (Billy Barratt), a 12-year-old with epilepsy who is bullied on a school trip that goes very awry. This arc plays like “Lord of the Flies” for the first half and then Casper is thrust into the narrative in a different way when it turns out he has a unique connection to the impending invasion.
“Invasion” is more about the days leading up to the titular event than anything else. It’s about panic and planning as it becomes clear that something extraterrestrial and violent is heading to the planet. The creators have openly acknowledged the influence of “War of the Worlds,” and it feels almost like that template is more Steven Spielberg’s 2005 version of that story than any other iterations. However, something that intense and terrifying demands focus, which “Invasion” consistently lacks. It’s always conveying its perceived sense of grand design and self-importance without ever really earning it. Viewers don’t get to know any of these characters beyond a single trait or two, making every single one of them feel like a cog in a machine.
That wouldn’t be such a problem if “Invasion” thought to replace its thin characters with spectacle, but it doesn’t even work on that level. There’s no urgency here as the threat stays largely undefined and the creators almost rely on their viewer’s attachment to other alien invasion projects to feel anything about this one. It’s a show that’s constantly keeping its viewers at a distance because it fails to present concrete stakes or challenges in a way that action movies traditionally do. It’s as if Kinberg and Weil’s determination to make more of a humanist drama about aliens than an action movie allowed them to forget to make it entertaining at the same time. Who knew the end of the world would be so dull? [D+].