I had no interest in Apple TV+ when I first heard about it. I already had more than enough streaming platforms, thank you.
Then I heard that there was going to be a Foundation series on 🍎📺➕, and I thought, I suppose I'm going to have to wait until the end of the first season of that and then sign up for the one week free trial.
But then a friend bought an Apple product and had no interest in the one year free subscription to 🍎📺➕ that came with it, so she gifted it to me. I signed up, signed in, and took a look through the library. Saw Greyhound with Tom Hanks. Watched it. It was quite good. Saw that there was also a Tom Holland movie named Cherry, and since I love me some Tom Holland, I watched it. It was stunningly good.
So I decided that I'd see what else there was to see on this platform... while waiting for Foundation to arrive.
Found an 8 part documentary called 1971: The Year That Music Changed Everything. Watched it. It was superb. Lots of stuff on bands that I loved, including The Beatles, The Velvet Underground, and David Bowie. It also placed the music into a societal context which was sometimes quite shocking...like footage of the dead bodies in the wake of the Attica Prison Prison Riot. (Or "Riot" as I've come to think of it.)
At this point I decided that 🍎📺➕ was the bee's knees, and I decided to trust them a bit and take a look at one of their premiere offerings, The Morning Show. I'm not a big fan of Jennifer Aniston, Reese Witherspoon, or Steve Carell, so I didn't think I'd make it through (much less past) the first episode, but lo and behold...it was quite good. I finished off the first season in short order and have started on the second.
So I thought I'd try Ted Lasso. First season superb. Second season not so much, but still had its moments.
And Foundation, of course. Which I have really come to love, though it took me a little while--since I kept expecting it to arc towards the Asimov novels. (It doesn't.)
And that's why I decided to have a look at Invasion. I'd read some reviews that were less than complimentary. In fact, they were pretty much uniform in declaring that it was a waste of time...all smoke and no fire. But you know, "just remember different people have peculiar tastes"...so I had a look.
I thought the first episode was brilliant. You very quickly became immersed in five different "worlds": Sheriff John Bell Tyson in Oklahoma, soldier Trevante Ward in "Afghanistan" (Morocco), Aneesha Malik and her fucked-up poor excuse for a husband in New York, school-boy Caspar Morrow in (or maybe near) London, and aerospace technician Mitsuki Yamato in Tokyo. All of them have serious problems before shit starts falling out of the sky, and that's where most of the focus of the first episode...and the three which follow it, for that matter...lies.
And that's the problem that most of the reviewers have with this show. Rotten Tomatoes concludes "Invasion attempts a slow burn but inadvertently lets its tension completely fizzle out with leaden pacing that will leave viewers impatient for the alien apocalypse to finally arrive."
Other reviewers say things which basically come down to this: "I spent four hours watching this show and haven't seen any aliens yet."
Well, that's one way of looking at it, I suppose. Although it's not true, since a giant alien does appear at the end of the second episode, but maybe the reviewer who wrote about the lack of aliens had fallen asleep by that point.
And more than that, the tension that is building vis-à-vis the impending invasion is constant. There are scenes of devastation that keep building, fear is run-in rampant...it's actually quite a masterful build-up. But you know what? I think even that defense is misguided. Because the way that the show focuses on people in dire circumstances is very compelling in and of itself. I have to say that I think that people who are angry because the aliens didn't arrive in the first episode (so to speak) are people who want formulaic science fiction plots.
Funny, because I just saw The Vast of Night on Amazon, and it seems to have gotten rare reviews--including a 92% rating on Rotten Tomatoes--and yet it is very much parallel in how the plot develops. As a matter of fact, you don't ever actually see an alien in this one--though you do get a vague look at a spaceship or two. And even though I enjoyed The Vast of Night, I think it is very much inferior to Invasion.
ADDENDUM: Well, as usual, I was too slow, and Friday came 'round again, as it tends to do, but this time I only watched the news for a minute, then dialed up Apple TV+. It was all set up to play the new episode of Foundation for me (nice the way they have that set up, by the way), but much to my surprise I clicked it over to the new (5th) episode of Invasion and watched it through. And? Well, we are moving farther into the consequences of the alien invasion, for sure. Seeing wounded people...seeing weird things that look like a cross between a burr and a spider being pulled from the inside of a human body. Getting a real feel for the confusion and horror that people are experiencing.
It's good tv.
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