Invasion Review

Invasion, the new AppleTV+ drama from co-creators Simon Kinberg and David Weil, is – you guessed it – about an alien invasion of Earth. Or, at least that’s what one assumes it is about, as after watching the five episodes initially provided to critics, there’s a whole lot of discussion, exposition, and attempts at character development (with varying degrees of success), and not a whole lot of references to aliens. Slow and measured world building isn’t a bad thing, but when you dole out information at a snail’s pace and don’t couple it with compelling characters, well, you end up with a show like this one.

The series follows five siloed storylines (at least thus far – although I can’t imagine all of them ever linking together in a meaningful manner due to how disparate most of them are) as their characters try to cope with the initial moments of the invasion. There’s the small town Oklahoma sheriff (Sam Neill) who is, naturally, just a day away from retirement when disaster strikes and a giant crater appears in a cornfield – and several of the town’s less savory characters end up missing. There’s the English school boy, who is horribly bullied by his classmates, whose bus gets thrown over a cliff en route to a school field trip, stranding him and his classmates and creating a mini-Lord of the Flies scenario. There’s the JASA sound engineer (Shiori Kutsuna, easily the breakout star of the show), whose must deal with personal tragedy when the invasion impacts a launch to the International Space Station. There’s the US solider in Afghanistan (Shamier Anderson, doing the best with the bland storyline he’s given), who loses his platoon in the destruction wrought by the invasion and must find his way out. And there’s the Arab-American family, living just outside of New York City, who are dealing with huge interpersonal issues while also trying to get out of the densely populated area, keep their kids safe, and combat the racist actions of their fellow Americans as everyone assumes the invasion is actually a terrorist attack.

As you can see, there’s a ton of storylines to serve all the while trying to inch the overall invasion plot along. And the series collapses under its own weight fairly quickly. The two most compelling arcs – the JASA and New York plots – remain engaging. The characters are easy to understand – we get who they are, what they want, and what hurdles they are facing – and the performances are the strongest of the series (Golshifteh Farahani as the wife and mother of the family is particularly strong). In fact, their arcs are so strong that I found myself wishing the story was just about them. Which gets to the heart of the issue: There’s just too much going on, too many characters, and too little forward narrative action on the invasion side of the story to justify the wide breadth of the series.

I understand the goal of having so many characters scattered around the world – the series is meant to take a look at how different people in different situations react to the confusion, violence, and complexities of an alien invasion. There’s a clear choice not to have any major character or arc linked to a national government (the JASA storyline is the closest, but the story makes clear that Japan’s ability to gather information from other world powers and trickle it down to the space program is limited to say the least). These are “average” people, with “average” lives, going about their daily tasks when they’re confronted with power outages, explosions, and pandemonium. It’s interesting to see some elements of what type of survival instincts emerge within these very different people. But when that is all you get for five episodes, it starts to drag the story down. Not to mention we’ve already seen multiple shows and films over the last decade exploring how “normal” people deal with apocalyptic scenarios, so this particular angle is hardly original and definitely not well structured.

The other major issue with an alien invasion narrative – and one that the series hasn’t had to confront yet, although I suspect it will before the season is through – is that there are really only two ways the story can ultimately end. Either the aliens come in peace – or peace is negotiated – or they’re here for nefarious reasons and there’s going to be a war of some sort until a winner is determined. And with the way things appear to be kicking off in the early goings of the invasion, well, I don’t think they’re here to ask us for some Netflix recommendations. And that is a problem from a long-term storytelling perspective. You have five isolated arcs – what happens when the aliens become players? Will certain places be safer than others? Will the writers be able to continue to service each set of characters when they also have to service the arc surrounding the aliens and their intentions? After how muddled and uninteresting sections of these first five episodes were, I have my doubts that adding aliens to the mix will help right the ship.

If you’re looking for an alien invasion story, there are far better ones than Invasion. If the series had stronger characters, a clearer focus, and a less scattered narrative arc across the different locales, it would be worth watching until the end of season one to see if they were able to fix the glaring issues within the story. But as is, with five hours of television already dragging, this isn’t a series worth wasting your time on.

Invasion premieres Friday, October 22 on AppleTV+ with the initial three episodes. Subsequent episodes will be released weekly. Five episodes were provided for initial review.