Hacker Cinema
Invasion
2021 · TV series · 3 seasons
Created by Simon Kinberg, David Weil
Earth is visited by an alien species that threatens humanity's existence. Events unfold in real time through the eyes of five ordinary people across the globe as they struggle to make sense of the chaos unraveling around them.
2 positive2 negative3 mixed1 neutralfrom 8 commenters
Where to watch
No streaming data for this title.
8 comments on Hacker News
The Morning Show, Severance, Silo, Tehran, Presumed Innocent, Ted Lasso, Slow Horses, Disclaimer, Shrinking, Loot, Severance, Where's Wanda?, Foundation, Cowboy Cartel (short documentary), Midnight Family, The Last Thing He Told Me, Invasion, Mythic Quest, Bad Monkey, Dickinson...
There's so many good shows on Apple TV.
Foundation the TV show was so interesting to me that it pushed me to read the book series.
I'm currently up to Foundation and Earth. The show is different, but I like the changes they made for the show, especially to the emperor's lineage. The show would be painfully boring if it was filmed in the style of the books with characters talking about what happened instead of showing.
I personally find the mentalics aspect of the books kind of lame, unscientific, and God like. I hope the show does not lean so heavily into them as it continues like the books have, but seems inevitable as I read through the book series.
Severance and For All Mankind get all the hype but See, Silo, and Invasion have all been great. The only true miss in their sci-fi shows for me has been Constellation. The only more boring sci-fi show I can think of is Beacon 23.
I actually really enjoyed season 1 of Invasion and then DNF'd season 2.
Foundation suffers from it's origins as a series of disjointed short stories in the pulp magazines of the era that were later lightly edited into books. They are chock full of generic characters standing around discussing interesting ideas with very little action.
There was no way to turn it into a television show without major rewrites.
However, Invasion is my call for the weakest scifi show they've done.
If you are interested in this stuff, you may also want to check out an Apple TV show called Invasion. Season 2 just started. I think overall the beginning episodes were better though. It was really engaging.
Right, I meant to suggest there might be some "culture" bleed. Another commenter suggested it had more to do with key Pixar figures leaving for Disney, at which point Disney's own offerings improved and Pixar's suffered.
I'm not very good at articulating "feelings" so bear with me: Early Pixar movies (to me) are timeless, positive, almost fairy-tale like. They're centrist, middle-of-the-road films that don't offend or validate anyone, just faithfully follow the Hero's Journey as they try to resolve some issue in the ideal world where we're all in this together. Toy Story is the best example-- literally every single toy could not be more different, but the entire point of the movie is about all of them finding ways to leverage their differences to advance the journey for all of them, not exploiting their shortcomings to hold everyone else back. Finding Nemo, Monsters Inc, The Incredibles, all are the same pattern. Pixar's money printer used to be endless asset-swaps of "Diversity: The Movie" (the secret to Sesame Street as well), and it was a beautiful thing before the concept was perverted by the same children who grew up watching these movies.
I don't have kids' show equivalents to name from AppleTV, but I do get the same feeling ("Diversity: The Show") from their regular shows. Ted Lasso is the obvious frontrunner. For All Mankind, Invasion, Foundation (caveat: I was really high when I watched this one). All of these beautifully weave together the themes of diversity and unity into a shared journey.
'Invasion' was so slow, all the characters on 'The Shrink Next Door' so unlikeable, I regret the time I spent watching both of them. I normally don't give up on shows and at least watch seasons to the end but I stopped after the second episode of 'Hello Tomorrow!' (on paper, it should be a winner for me).
Invasion was good but not great. It got off off to a solid start with well-developed, interesting characters (well-acted), good music and good direction. I also really liked how the story-line for the character played by Sam Neill dashed my expectations (don’t want to spoil it for others). Not knowing what exactly was happening required a certain investment in the fate of the characters and while watching I wasn’t sure if they pay-off would be worth it. Unfortunately, the second half of the season did not quite live up to the potential that the first part hinted at. After finishing the show, I found it didn’t really leave a lasting impact on me though it’s probably still worth a watch if you like science fiction.
Not quite science fiction – but I’d highly recommend the Shining Girls mini-series. I like self-contained shows that tell their stories in one season and both my wife and I thought this was excellent (story, acting, direction, visuals). Again, the viewer doesn’t know what’s happening at the start: does the protagonist have some sort of schizophrenia or is there something stranger going on? (not going to spoil it). Apparently, it was (loosely?) based on a book but I’d never heard of the book so can’t say anything about that.