Name - Invasion
Released - 2021
Director- Various mish-mash.
My sci-fi binge continues and I finished watching the first season of Invasion on Apple TV. This time the story is about aliens starting to invade, although by watching the series, they don't seem to be taking it so seriously.
The series follows characters from many different places and how they react when aliens start to attack different cities and the impact it has. There seems to also be a cameo role from JAXA or JASA in the show with a lesbain astronaut and her very emotional girlfriend in ground control. Lucky the aliens have access to the back album of David Bowie and at one point play back their first song together, aptly the Ground Control one.
Following the girls very deep connecting love story through space and possibly alien abduction? is a key part of the story. I started getting Chris Hadfield vibes when they played their song together. I thought Chris' in sync singing with the Barenaked Ladies was much more uplifting though.
Shioli Kutsuna (the ground control astronaut) must have gone through at least a few kilos of onions for this role as she seemed to cry non-stop. If she wasn't crying, she was sobbing in the shower with just some panties on or climbing the expensive space monitor dish.
The first series was somehow bad, but still watchable. Some of the scenes were so low budget and corny, but I had the feeling I wanted to see what other cringey stuff they would come up with next.
The character Golshifteh Farahani played by Aneesha Malik is another one of those weird storylines. She is a superbrain doctor who graduated Harvard, and as soon as the electricity goes out, grabs the kids and decides to start running, driving or just keep moving. Once she gets out of one car, she is looking for a place to jog to or steal another car, just so she can keep moving. I think she would be great to star in Lord of the Rings following Gandalf running across Middle Earth.
Another group of characters are some school kids who get stuck down a ditch and one of the boys has siezures, another is a bully and it just gets more ridiculous as it goes along! For half of the series, most of our characters dont even encounter aliens or know whats going on, but apparently many places are ravaged by ... the aliens.. this is when it gets even more hilarious.
I took the above photo and you can see how ridiculous the aliens look. After seeing some of the great aliens in Foundation, this was just a joke! Some weird black blobby things with tentacles just wonder around aimlessly trying to kill people. So far, in the first series, the aliens don't seem to be an intelligent life form, they just can travel through space and invade planets with their low tech insect like bodies.
The series has a low-budget feel for it and yeah, there are many better alien invasion movies, but somehow I did stick through the first series and near the end the storyline seems like it might pick up, but it wouldn't be hard to improve on the first series tbh!
My favorite actor in the series so far has been Shamier Anderson who seems ready for a bigger role than here. He has a great screen presence and you would like to see more depth to his character, but alas there isn't any.
I thought I recognised him from somewhere, and it was from the John Wick part 4 film. Overall, I will start to watch the next season and hopefully it will be an improvement on the first one which is sort of watchable, but nothing to rave home about.
Have you seen it?
Thanks for reading.
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The title image was created by myself in canva and using the CineTV logo and image source.
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Used under fair-use section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976.