Invasion Season 2

 

This Portal Coil

Invasion
Season 2
10 episodes October 2023
USA Apple

Warning: Some spoilerage.

I really wasn’t sure if I could get back to Invasion for a second series. I’d loved the first season, which was partly responsible for winning me back to modern TV during the pandemic but, by the end of the last episode (you can find my review of that first year here) I felt the ending was kind of a cop out. The aliens had been seemingly defeated only to leave one of the stars, Casper (played by Billy Barrat) in a coma and a sudden surprise mothership floating in the Earth’s atmosphere. That all seemed like an afterthought to me... a kind of tack on ending to keep the story going for a second season.

But, here we are and I returned and I found that, wow, there was actually enough material left in the original story set up to keep me watching for the next ten episodes.

This one has exactly the same MO as the first one with four different groups of characters. We have... 1. The kids who go after the sleeping Casper when he is taken to France... including India Brown as Jamila and the villain turned ‘good all along’ Paddy Holland as Monty (in a performance that really shows that this lad should go far if he sticks with the acting bug). 2. Golshifteh Farahani as Aneesha Malik, still on the run with the magical alien shard, protecting her children and running into a bunch of characters in a group called ‘The Movement’, headed up by Enver Gjokaj as Clark (who you may remember from Agent Carter, reviewed here and his further exploration of his character there in the last series of Agents Of SHIELD... reviewed here). 3. Mitsuki, played by Shioli Kutsuna, who lost her girlfriend to the aliens in the first episode and who is now called in to help the government further penetrate their mysteries, including an amazing new character called Maya, played by the equally watchable Naian González Norvind. 4. And finally, we have ex-Navy Seal Trevante, played by Shamier Anderson, who links up with new character Rose, played by Nedra Marie Taylor... tying the story right back in to the first episode of series one and Sam Neill’s character. He gets a mention and a head shot here and there is potential for him to actually return to the show in the future, if whatever reason that kept him from only being in the opening episode is somehow resolved.

And, yeah, it’s good stuff. The story is spun along, the acting is wonderful, the music is great, the action sequences are riveting and there’s even a new version of the aliens - nicknamed hunter/killers - who are impervious to fire, unlike the aliens in the first series. It’s compelling stuff and had me hooked again right from the start.

However, I can’t help but think that the show is being kept spinning instead of coming to a natural conclusion. In the last episode, Trevante manages to cross over through a portal opened by Mitsuki and joins the mind image of Caspar to bring the battle to the aliens and then, well, I guess we wait until season three, however far away that is. I’m going to forget all the story again while I wait for the company behind all this to get its act together, I suspect.

So a great series with pretty good special effects too but, it seems to me like it’s being strung out for the sake of being longer... which seems to be the way of all modern American TV these days (I hope the new ‘Disneyfied’ series of Doctor Who doesn’t go down a similar route... is it too much to ask?). So, honestly, getting a bit tired of the cliffhanger nature of series finales and the ‘will they/won’t they’ carry on with another season... which seems to be less than fifty/fifty these days. I’m thinking that not starting to watch anything until the show is finished for good might be the best way to deal with modern TV at the present. There’s no certainty you’re ever going to get a finished story. But, yeah, I like the show a lot and I’ll be there for their next one, assuming they get that far ahead with it before the plug is pulled (and before some of the child actors grow up to be too old to play their characters within the context of the story). Invasion is good show and I hope it manages to keep itself going.

Invasion

Space Invaders

Invasion
USA October - December 2021
Series 1 Ten episodes

Warning: This one has spoilers invading the reading space.

Okay, so ignoring the many other films and TV shows with the exact same title, Invasion is a new episodic serial which was broadcast at the end of last year. Now, I can’t quite remember how I first heard of it, it may have been a semi-recommendation on the All The Colours Of The Dark podcast but, truth be told, I wasn’t going to bother with it. Then, however, I found out that there had been a CD release of some of Max Richter’s score for the show. Well, okay then, now I had to watch it (the CD should also be joining me through my letterbox at some point today, as I type these words, too).

And I’m glad I did because it’s a phenomenally intense show about an apparently hostile alien invasion of planet Earth, told through the lens of four different characters in different parts of the world. Well, okay, five different characters initially, but one drops out of the narrative in the first episode (the expensive one), which comprises the openings (and in one case closing) of three of the simultaneous running stories of people trying to survive the next week, with two more characters in different time zones on the planet starting up from the second episode onwards.

So we have Sam Neil as a small town sheriff in the US. If you can believe it, he’s on his last day of work before retirement and the writers totally run with that cliché and take it to its more than obvious conclusion at the end of the first episode. Then we have Mitsuki, played by Shioli Kutsuna. She works for the Japanese space agency JASA as a technician and, in the first episode, her astronaut girlfriend blasts off into space but encounters something deadly there. Mitsuki needs to know what happened to her and how her spacecraft was damaged, at whatever cost.

Next up is Aneesha, played by Golshifteh Farahani. She is the mother of two children living happily with her husband until the day she finds out he’s been having an affair with another woman and is about to leave her... right as the world finds itself under attack and the two of them have to put their new differences aside to try and ensure their kids’ survival. Then we have Shamier Anderson as Trevante, a soldier in the Middle East whose entire troop (and more) is taken out during an ‘alien encounter’. Alone, wounded and confused, he just needs to get out of the country and back home to America to make peace with his wronged wife.

And lastly there’s Caspar, played brilliantly by Billy Barratt. He’s one of a group of school children who find themselves stranded in the country and trapped in a huge crater after an alien attack, where it all gets a bit Lord Of The Flies for a while. I’d have to say that he’s, for me, the best thing in the show and totally carries it... along with his schoolgirl love interest played strongly by India Brown and an equally brilliant performance from Paddy Holland as the hateful school bully, who we find is more than just a two dimensional presence and a much more complex, fragile character himself.

And it’s all kinda great. The four story strands never really threaten to come together as they’re supposed to be four different viewpoints on the slowly emerging picture of the attacking aliens although, it has to be said, two of the least likely threads you would expect to join up do overlap and characters ‘team up’, so to speak, in London in the penultimate episode of the first season. And this way of looking at four simultaneous storylines throughout kept me absolutely hooked, as it makes for an intriguing, slow reveal on everything, not unwrapping its secrets too early and allowing the intensity of the mystery and strong (sometimes even brutal in terms of emotional punchiness) events and encounters to build and create almost unbearable suspense. I couldn’t stop watching this thing and binged the whole thing in a couple of evenings.

There are odd things about it too but, that just adds to the freshness, for the most part. For instance, there’s a change to the format in one, shorter episode which focuses on only one of the sets of characters I mentioned earlier and, it’s very much in the vein of the old War Of The Worlds moment where everyone is trying to stay out of reach of an alien invader which is loose in a house, trying not to alert it to their presence as they know that if they do, the end would be relatively swift. Also, there’s an odd subplot involving this same set of characters towards the end of the run where they are being hunted by a splinter group of humans for, honestly, no good reason that I could fathom. Not sure what was going on there, to be honest. It’s taut and one, long suffering character, cashes in their chips at this point but, yeah, no idea why.

My biggest surprise and delight, though, was when we first meet the schoolchildren in episode two at, as the caption says, London, England, United Kingdom, Earth (which does suggest that, at some point in a future season, we might not necessarily be on Earth anymore). The thing is, the kids start off in my small home town of Enfield. There’s the market place with the band stand five minutes from where I live, a reverse shot of a bus going past Pearsons of Enfield, before they go into the Grammar School I used to attend and get on a school bus (which inexplicably goes over Tower Bridge a minute later). I had no idea this was being shot here and, judging by how crowded the streets are, I can only assume the scenes were taken with small cameras hidden from the public. I can’t see how they would have managed to lock down the area here in Enfield Town for shooting without a lot of people knowing about it. But it was great to see my home town on screen, in a big budget US sci-fi/horror show, no less.

There’s also the odd thing where the wrap up comes in the ninth of the ten episodes (where another major character dies although, it would seem, that also isn’t the last we’ll hear of that character, perhaps, since there’s still obviously some brain activity in there, even if this person isn't breathing anymore). Everything seems concluded in the ninth and, mostly episode ten just deals with the aftermath but, because of the way events have unfolded (and the insistence of one character that things aren’t necessarily over, plus her sinister kid who obviously knows something), you kinda know they’re building to something else and, sure enough, something happens at the conclusion of the last episode that sets up the next season of Invasion.

Which, I’m delighted to say, has been commissioned and is currently scheduled to release in the Autumn. I wasn’t sure it would because, when I saw a load of reviews of this, I was absolutely gobsmacked to find that most people seemed to hate the show. Furthermore, they seemed to hate it for all the reasons that I loved it. So that’s a bit strange.

And that’s me done with Invasion until the second series comes along... I’d recommend it to anyone. Looking at some of the criticisms the show has received, they all seem to centre on the fragmentary nature of the story but, for me, this is what kept the show alive. Admittedly, the ditching of a main story arc from the first episode seems a little strange and one wonders if there was some production trouble at some point, which necessitated a change to the script. Also, there are a heck of a lot of loose ends and unanswered questions within the show so, yeah, I think it’s perfectly credible to assume the writers have more to say on this one. I hope the second season doesn’t spoil the excellent work done here and, yeah, I can’t wait to see it.

Paterson

Solo Killer Patters On

Paterson
2016 France/Germany/USA
Directed by Jim Jarmusch
UK cinema release print.

Paterson is one of those quietly paced, unassuming masterpieces that Jim Jarmusch releases to the world with a minimum of fuss and which then continue to haunt you for months or years at a time.
I’m rarely disappointed with this director, a man I’ve been watching since I first saw his third feature, the excellent Down By Law (reviewed here), when it debuted on the Alex Cox presented BBC2 TV season of Moviedrome, back in 1990. He is one of the key directors of the 1980s independent American cinema movement (if such a thing really exists) along with other notables such as Hal Hartley and, to a certain extent, Steven Soderbergh.

This movie has funny timing for me because, only the other day, I was contemplating the current state of the ‘indie film movement’ and was thinking that a lot of those kinds of directors either stay in their particular artistic niche and continue to make very similar films with declining profits (because they are no longer the ‘new face on the scene’) or they start making bigger, more commercial films for major Hollywood studios and kind of accidentally stop doing what they were best at and going for the dollars. Either way is a valid choice and I can’t blame anyone for taking either route but it struck me at the time that Jarmusch is, to my mind and with my limited exposure to the field, unique in that he seems to be making more and more commercially accessible movies like Ghost Dog: The Way Of The Samurai, Broken Flowers and Only Lovers Left Alive (reviewed here) while at the same time making them in a way which is uniquely a part of his identity and without selling out his artistic leanings as part of the process.

On the other hand, I’m not sure how bankable he’s seen by studio heads. The opening night screening of Paterson I went to had maybe ten people in it but... he’s certainly doing a lot more things which seem to be targeted for an expanded audience expectation while still making what are, frankly, some of the more beautiful and poetic works of modern cinema. Those last three films I’ve name checked, for instance, have much less of the sense of not particularly being about anything than a lot of his earlier films did and they have a kind of story arc to them.

Paterson is no exception in that it’s both an easily accessible movie with a current top star (Adam Driver, who is pretty hot right now after playing Kilo Ren in the new Star Wars movies) and it’s also a great piece of cinema. That being said, it does putter along quietly with no clear story arc and in this way, among others, it’s reminiscent of Jarmusch’s earlier works.

The film is about a week in the life of one man, named Paterson, who lives with his girlfriend and her intimidating British bulldog. There’s no clear story arc at all... the movie comprising little incidents and highlights without building into something that even approaches a classic or even modern Hollywood sense of cause and effect film-making.

Paterson, the man, is a bus driver who lives in the town of Paterson, New Jersey and who drives a bus which says Paterson. Every day we see his internal body clock waking him up at around 6.15am and we follow parts of his day and his regular routine as he kisses his girlfriend, eats his breakfast cereal, drives his bus, composes poetry in his head for writing in his notebook on his lunch hour, walks back home, takes the dog for a walk and then leaves him tied up while he has a pint of beer at his local bar. Each day is the same routine but the beauty of it, which is part of the genius of Jim Jarmusch, is that all the little incidents and differences to each day are contrasted against each other and affect the way that the central character, and the audience, experiences Paterson’s daily journey through life. So little things that are ‘off’ slightly, like him waking up a quarter of an hour late, give us a window into his mental state, to a certain extent, or at least allows us to make deductions about him... if we're that way inclined.

Adam Driver is an actor who I really didn’t like when I saw him in Star Wars - The Force Awakens (reviewed here). He seemed to be a weak villain at first but he kind of grew on me on subsequent viewings and when I saw him again in Midnight Special (reviewed here) I realised there was more to him than I’d at first realised and that his almost understated style of playing a character might not, at first, seem the best choice for a Star Wars character but who, I suspect, will pay dividends later on in that particular branch of the saga. Here he proves himself a perfect Jarmusch actor, quietly strolling through the scenes, a lot of them played silently as they are pitched against his voice over as he tries out new balances of words and writes poetry in his head or in his diary... something which Jarmusch chooses to also illustrate via superimposed typography on screen as the words flow from Paterson’s creative mind. Yeah, this is yet another of a fair few movies this year, it seems, where the directors' have chosen to throw up text on the screen to illustrate certain things in their movie and which I’ve both moaned about and celebrated in equal measure, depending on how much they detracted or added to the immersion factor. Jarmusch, I’m glad to say, handles this element very well and it’s not at all gimmicky or distracting as it was in, say, The Shallows (reviewed here).

Paterson’s girlfriend, Laura,  is played by Golshifteh Farahani who is both absolutely wonderful and adorable as a quirky, live at home companion. Each day she is up to something passionate and, possibly, damaging to Paterson’s home but she certainly has a quirky charm. She spends a lot of time painting... the walls, curtains, her dresses as she is wearing them and Paterson returns each day to some new surprise or change of scenery. There’s a beautiful design moment near the end of the movie where she has been going through a phase of painting black and white circular patterns and lines and when she is in the kitchen preparing her cup cakes for sale at a local event, the cupcakes are patterned in exactly the same kinds of monotone designs as everything else such as her dress and the walls and curtains in the kitchen. There’s a shot in here where it all comes together in an abundance of visual saturation and which we see Driver’s Paterson is fully aware of,  just as we are as an audience. It’s a great little sequence and one of many beautiful little moments which make up the film.

There’s a whole host of great actors in here, of course, as you would expect from the kinds of films that Jarmusch makes... they need to be good not to stick out like a sore thumb in this kind of piece. Everyone gets a little moment to shine, not least of which are a couple of teenagers who are on Paterson’s bus. I knew they both looked really familiar but I couldn’t place them as the scene played out. It wasn’t until later, when I looked them up, that I found they were the two child leads from Wes Anderson’s excellent Moonrise Kingdom (reviewed here) and it was just so nice seeing them working again here. Three thumbs up there for a great cameo casting choice.

The film also, to a certain extent, shows Jarmusch’s... let’s say ‘fetish’... for multicultural groups of people coming together and communicating in a way which shoots through any barriers and expresses a truly post modern society of which we are all a part. Everyone seems to be speaking the same language in this one so there’s not so much of  an emphasis on ‘alienation breeds communication’ as there has been in some of this director’s works but he still champions the ideal of a warm and fuzzy global society and I can only applaud him for that.

And that’s about all I’ve got to say about Paterson other than the small audience who I saw it with all seemed to love it and that many of the lighter, comedic moments in the film were, it seemed to me, well appreciated by all. And I was personally happy to find a reference to Abbot and Costello's "Who's on first" routine in this one. It’s a gentle and poetic movie which doesn’t try to hammer home any big ideas and the deftness of touch of the observations which are the building blocks of the movie will both illuminate and haunt you... staying with you, as I indicated before, long after the credits have begun to roll. Another big, hard recommend from me and another movie that proves that this particular director knows exactly what cinema is all about and is able to deliver. In other words... another Jarmusch masterpiece.