A bullied London teen (Billy Barratt’s Casper) has epilepsy, while Trevante (Shamier Anderson) is a distracted American soldier in Afghanistan. On Long Island, we meet Aneesha (Golshifteh Farahani), who set aside her medical aspirations to raise her two kids (Azhy Robertson and Tara Moayedi) with her hunky hubby (Firas Nassar). Over 10 hours, some storylines will eventually intersect, some new ones will be introduced and some will stop abruptly and never be mentioned again - in a way that I’m sure reminded the creators of Janet Leigh in Psycho, but which comes across more like Carmen Electra in Scary Movie.ĭon’t look for any main focal character or storyline here, though Sam Neill is the series’ biggest star, playing a grouchy Oklahoma sheriff investigating a bizarre crop formation (and other stuff) with his trusted deputy (DeWanda Wise). Around the world, strange things are happening to unrelated people dealing with their own individual dramas, unexplainable events that relate to some cosmic phenomenon that will eventually have to do with aliens, but not at such a fast rate that I’d advise anybody to hold their breath. Structurally, Invasion is something like Independence Day meets Babel. Sent all 10 episodes, critics can at least charge forward into the void, but audiences trying to find the impetus for weekly viewing will struggle to find anything to latch onto. The show unfolds as a process of endless tantalization that I found amusing at first, then annoying and, finally, simply confusing. Hailing from David Weil ( Hunters) and Simon Kinberg (various X-Men things), Invasion verges on 10 episodes of setup so pure and unfulfilling that a better title would be Evasion. I enjoy a good setup so much that I’m confident that I’ve written multiple reviews with this exact same setup about enjoying a good setup.īy rights, then, Apple TV+’s new drama Invasion should be my favorite show of the year. "The nightmare has already begun," and will never end, Mr.Cast: Shamier Anderson, Golshifteh Farahani, Sam Neill, Firas Nassar, Shioli Kutsuna, Billy Barratt
A word to the wise, don't watch the worthless new series aka "The impostors", you know what I mean.
One of my all-time favourite tv show (with "The twilight zone", "The outer limits", "The wild wild west", "The time tunnel" and "Mission : impossible"). The best brainwashing episodes are : "The experiment", "The leeches", "The innocent", "The dark outpost", "The possessed" and "The pit". Who knows ? The aesthetic of the show also adds more terror to the stories (the Wayne Fitzgerald expressionist title credits, the dead-serious tone of William Conrad's narration that gives you a cold warning at the beginning and the end of each episode, the Dominic Frontiere's suffocating music and the distorted cinematography). According to me, the David Vincent character is a blend of Cary Grant, from "North by northwest", and Kevin Mc Carthy, from "Invasion of the body snatchers" : the innocent witness who becomes the new Cassandra, alone against everybody ! The pessimistic message of the series is equivocal : the world is corrupted by the authorities (officials, politicians, army, C.I.A., mafia) or the world is dominated by a claustrophobic mass conformism or the world is on the verge of being overthrown by the emotionless Soviet Union agents (blue collar workers who manufacture weapons and torture to get informations in hidden factories, and businessmen who infiltrate the power and whose bodies turn red when they die).
Among the best episode, "The innocent" sums up the paranoiac symptoms at its best when Michael Rennie brainwashes Roy Thinnes in his flying saucer. One of the best show produced by Quinn Martin, including "The untouchables" and "The fugitive". "The invaders" is the last great 1960's series and it is inspired by the "Invasion of the body snatchers" concept of conspiracy : science fiction + horror + reality = the fear of the unknown.