TV review Television
Invasion review – no stranger danger in Apple’s anaemic alien takeover
Meteor showers, mass nosebleeds, missing people … this small-screen tale of extra-terrestrials coming to Earth could be thrilling – if only something would actually happen
Lucy Mangan
@LucyMangan Fri 22 Oct 2021 14.30 BST
As someone who is currently being destroyed by
Squid Game – with which Netflix has played upon our collective anxiety strings like the world’s most gleefully malevolent violinist – I wholeheartedly welcome an epic tale of global takeover by alien beings in which almost nothing, in fact, happens.
Invasion (Apple TV+) is balm to my harrowed soul. It starts off traditionally enough. A mysterious something falls out of the sky and lands with a kerpow! in an isolated part of the world (here, the Arabian desert), witnessed by a lone traveller whose curiosity about this strange happening soon proves fatal. Mr Inquisitive meets his end by being sort of carbonised and liquidised at the same time. The special effects throughout the 10-part series are intriguingly off-beam and satisfying. Unfortunately you get about one per episode.
And then – well, that’s about it. For ages and ages.
We go round the world (travel costs were presumably where most of the series’ rumoured $200m budget was spent) meeting the characters. There’s a sheriff in Oklahoma (played by Sam Neill) on – yes! – his last day before retirement, called out to track down two men who went missing at about the same time as a crop circle-cum-crater appeared in a local cornfield. There’s a happily married couple with two children in Long Island, whose home is the only one left standing when their neighbourhood is destroyed by the reverberations of some unseen impact; a delicate schoolboy and his bully in London; a coachload of children on a school trip who crash into a quarry during a meteor shower . . .