Invasion (2021)

Like This Is Us, Invasion is mostly interested in an emotional connection with its characters, rather than in the trappings of science fiction — and it isn’t afraid of doing a little manipulation to get there.

There is, you’ll have gathered, a lot of story here. It should also be pointed out that a lot of it is very good. ... The problem is that bigness again. In a bid to tell a sweeping story for all mankind (to borrow another strong Apple TV+ title), Invasion takes hours, literally, to get to the invasion.

A smaller-scale account of alien attack that foregoes the usual city-busting CGI in favour of a more intimate, personal approach. It takes its sweet time about it, though.

You can feel the creators Simon Kinberg and David Weil eager to draw parallels and find resonance with current issues: the fracturing family also in effect become refugees as they attempt to flee to safety; Trevante is a hostile invader about to feel what life is like on the other side of the equation, and so on. Even so, Invasion is a slow burn that threatens to become simply slow.

There are precious few pieces of “Invasion” that don’t feel like they’re already riffing on pre-established genre ideas. It’s that all of these storylines, when added together, make up a whole that’s almost completely devoid of any emotional anchor.

Maybe all these different storylines are going to meet up, maybe they’re all going to keep wandering around. It will take great patience to find out which.

Feels so unhurried in its template of watching the crisis unfold as a global phenomenon as to blunt the drama.

As “Invasion” hops from storyline to storyline to yet another storyline, its blunt dialogue and characterizations fail to make any of its disparate threads as immediately compelling as its scattered narrative needs to stay afloat.