Josh Reviews Secret Invasion

Secret Invasion is the latest Marvel show on Disney+.  In this six-episode series, a grizzled Nick Fury returns to the field in an attempt to stop a civil war between the shape-shifting Skrull aliens on Earth.  At the end of Captain Marvel, set in 1995, Fury had discovered and befriended a group of Skrull refugees, and he and Carol Danvers promised to help them find a new world of their own.  But now, decades later, Fury has apparently failed in his promise, resulting in a group of skulls radicalizing and vowing to take control of Earth as their new home instead.  Led by the villainous Gravik, these Skrulls use their shapeshifting powers to take control of key people across the globe, and Fury quickly finds himself adrift in a sea of quicksand, uncertain who he can trust to help save the world.

There are some interesting ideas at play here in Secret Invasion, and it’s a pleasure seeing Samuel L. Jackson finally get to take center stage as Nick Fury.  The idea of using the shapeshifting Skrulls as the villains of a paranoia-laced crime-thriller story is a great choice, and Mr. Jackson really sinks his teeth into it.

But overall I was surprised that I felt this series was just so-so.  It wasn’t epic enough, nor was it emotional enough.  The show never quite broke out into a truly exciting, gripping story for me.  It was smaller scale, with fewer connections to the broader MCU, than I’d hoped for.  And the plot sort of fell apart for me in the final two episodes.  The show isn’t bad — there’s a lot that I enjoyed, as I’ll detail as I continue with this review.  But this feels like a show that should have been GREAT, and I didn’t feel they achieved that.

Secret Invasion was a fun mini-series and crossover storyline in the Avengers comics in 2008-09, overseen by Brian Michael Bendis.  I was excited to see that “who can you trust?” story brought into the MCU.  Sadly, this series doesn’t make any attempt to adapt that comic story.  They just took the title and the involvement of Skrulls as the villains.  On the one hand, I understand that, as the original comic book series was very tied into the expansive Marvel comics continuity and doesn’t translate easily to the post-blip status of the MCU, in which there aren’t so many active super-heroes.  On the other hand, I don’t think the show managed to capture the “anyone could be a Skrull” interest/excitement of the original comic.

Shall we dig in deeper?  Beware SPOILERS from here on in.

What’s good?

Let’s start with Samuel L. Jackson, who as always is a fantastic and charismatic on-screen presence.  It’s a pleasure to finally see him at the center of an MCU story.  The series is filled with terrific Nick Fury scenes that Mr. Jackson just kills, such as his moment with Rhodey in which he declares: “I’m Nick Fury — even when I’m out, I’m in.”  Great stuff!  It’s nice to actually get a character-arc for Fury here, as we learn that he’s been suffering from a crisis of confidence after the Blip, and he has to re-find his mojo.  (I wish this fit more neatly into previous MCU continuity.  The end credits scene of Spider-Man: Far from Home showed Fury in space with the Skrulls and having a grand old time.  It didn’t seem like Fury was depressed, or that he’d given up on working with the Skrulls to find them a new planet.)  I also enjoyed getting to learn a little more about Fury’s life when he’s not saving the world; specifically his marriage to Priscilla (who is really the Skrull Varra).  I love the idea that Fury has been married most the time we’ve known him!  Charlayne Woodard was terrific as Priscilla; a great match with Mr. Jackson’s Fury.  I hope we see her again!!  (We know Fury will be back for The Marvels — will we see Priscilla, too?)

It was a pleasure seeing the great Ben Mendelssohn (Rogue One) back as the Skrull Talos.  He’s fantastic; he brings such a wonderfully rumpled, slightly off-beat quality to his line-readings as Talos.  He’s a tremendous dramatic actor and at the same time he always seems to have an endearing twinkle in his eye.  I thought he had great chemistry with Samuel L. Jackson, and I loved the way the film explored the complicated friendship between Fury and Talos.  (I was very bummed they killed off Talos.  I’d have loved to have seen a lot more of this character.)

I’m happy to see the Skrulls finally brought back into the MCU after the end of Captain Marvel seemed to promise more with them.  I love the idea that the way Fury rose to power in S.H.I.E.L.D. was by having a group of secret shape-shifting Skrulls on his side.

Of the new characters, by far my favorite was Olivia Colman (The Night Manager, Fleabag) as MI6 senior agent Sonya Falsworth.  Ms. Colman was an absolute JOY to watch.  I adored the jovial energy she brought to her every scene.  She was a ray of light in this fairly dark, dour show.  Not a light of goodness — Sonya does some pretty dastardly things.  But she seemed to be having so much fun as she did!  Bring on the spin-off show focusing on Sonya!!

I thought Kingsley Ben-Adir did strong work as Gravik.  He didn’t play Gravik like an alien-super-villain; he played him as a very human, embittered and angry man.  I think that was exactly the right choice.  He was compelling when on-screen.  (I just wish the show had given Mr. Ben-Adir more to do as Gravik.  I wish we’d explored his character more deeply.)

I liked the use of flashbacks throughout the show.  They did a good job on de-aging Samuel L. Jackson.  If anything, I’d have loved to have seen more flashbacks, exploring more about what’s happened between Fury and the Skrulls since 1995 and Captain Marvel, and what Fury has been up to since Endgame.

The attack on the President’s convoy in episode four is a fantastic action sequence.  That was a highlight of the show for me.  (I wish episodes five and six were able to match the intensity of that sequence, combined with the emotion of the death of Talos.)

I loved hearing them say “Super-Skrull” out loud.  I’ve been reading about Super-Skrulls in the comics since I was a kid!!!  The Gravik vs G’iah fight in the finale was fun.  I loved seeing G’iah using Mantis’ powers to make Gravik sleep.  (I was amused to see how the show used pre-existing MCU characters to duplicate the Fantastic Four’s powers that the Super-Skrull has in the comics.  Obviously there’s no FF yet in the MCU, so they had to find MCU equivalents — so for instance they used Groot’s stretching abilities instead of Reed Richards’, and the fiery power from Extremis (from Iron Man Three) instead of Johnny Storm’s flames, etc…)

What’s not so good?

The set-up of the show doesn’t make any sense to me.  Why were Fury and Captain Marvel unable to find a new planet for the Skrulls?  There’s a huge galaxy out there!  I feel like we needed some sort of explanation for this.  (Is it possible Fury wasn’t really trying, so that he could keep this group of Skrulls working for him indefinitely?  That would have been a very dark, but very interesting idea, but the show never actually goes there.  Fury sort-of suggests this in his final confrontation with Gravik in the finale, but that turns out to be G’iah in disguise so who knows.)  Fury’s failure to keep his promise to the Skrulls is what incites all the action in this series, so I feel like we needed to better understand what happened here.

The show is full, and I mean full, of plot points that don’t make sense.  This bugged me more and more as the series went on and more and more things that didn’t make sense piled up.  Here are some examples:

• In the series’ opening sequence with Everett Ross, why does Talos shoot the agent who is onto the existence of the Skrulls and Gravik’s evil plans?
• At the end of the premiere, did G’iah purposefully deceive Talos and Fury by tagging bags that were decoys, not the real bombs?
• Why do characters keep calling those bombs “dirty bombs” when there’s no evidence after they go off that they were anything other than regular bombs?  (If they were dirty bombs, wouldn’t Fury be dead soon after, seeing as he was right next to them when they went off?)
• In episode two, why do the Russians let Sonya, a British MI6 agent, interrogate the bombing suspect, alone???  I can’t imagine any circumstance in which the Russians would ever agree to that, I don’t care how much secret influence Sonya has.
• In a news report, they say that the bombings killed TWO THOUSAND people.  That seems like a much huger number than we saw at the end of episode one.  That is an incredible, 9/11-like body count that feels to me like it would change the world.  It doesn’t feel right for what we saw.
• Then, Fury is being blamed for the death of those two thousand people… and so Rhodey meets with him in a restaurant??  That seems crazy to me.  I know Rhodey’s men emptied the restaurant, but the restaurant staff was still there — we see the bartender in the background when Fury walks in.  It would surely get out that Rhodey and Fury met, which would look really bad for him and the U.S., right??
• The explanation we get for how how G’iah survived getting shot at the end of episode three is ridiculous.  She put herself in Gravik’s the experimental machine?  And no one else in the compound noticed??  Come on.  If anyone can just step into that machine and give themselves super-powers, why aren’t all of Gravik’s men now Super-Skrulls?  If the answer to that is that Gravik wanted the power only for himself, why leave the machine intact and active?
• How on Earth did G’iah get Talos’ body (for the funeral in episode five)???  He’s killed in front of tons of American troops at the end of episode four — so wouldn’t the body of this shape-shifting alien be in the custody of the Americans or the Brits, presumably under high security???
• We see that Priscilla has, stored in her house, two tactical backpacks filled with guns that she and G’iah use to fight off the assassination squad Gravik sends for them.  So why did Priscilla have to go through all that business with the safety-deposit box at the bank to get a gun at the end of episode four??

I liked seeing some MCU familiar faces like Rhodey, Maria Hill, and Everett Ross, though frankly I don’t think the show used any of those characters well.  I didn’t like Rhodey’s scenes early in the series — it felt like he was being way too antagonistic to Fury, without reason.  It was so out of character that my wife guessed he was a Skrull right away.  Then when he’s revealed as a Skrull, he still feels like a one-dimensional villain.  I didn’t feel the show got enough juice out of Rhodey (a former good-guy) as a villain.  Then, when he and Ross are seen waking up in the Skrulls’ compound, the show doesn’t address how long they’ve been being impersonated!  I can’t believe the show didn’t give us that info!  It feels like exploring the repercussions of that for these two characters should have been a huge part of the end of the show.  Instead, they punted that completely.  That was a disappointment.  Speaking of Ross, I was bummed that, until that short scene in the finale, he was only in that one sequence in the opening of episode one, and that wasn’t even the real him, just a Skrull version.  The promotion suggested that Ross would be involved in this show, but he didn’t wind up being important at all.  Then there’s Maria Hill.  It was great to see Cobie Smulders again, and she actually had a lot of juicy stuff in the first episode.  I’m sad they killed her off.  I thought this series would be an opportunity to actually flesh out her character, finally.  I feel like they wasted that by killing her off so quickly.  That was a bummer to me.

The finale was somewhat underwhelming in my opinion.  Why on Earth does Gravik let Fury/G’iah stand with him in the superpower machine???   Duh — then G’iah gets the same super-powers Gravik has!!  That was so dumb!!  I was also so disappointed, as noted above, that the show couldn’t be bothered to tell us how long Rhodey and Ross have been impersonated by Skrulls.  It’s weird to me that Fury assumes the President will do the right thing, despite repeatedly saying in the show that humans can’t co-exist with Skrulls.  Then the about-face we get from the happy ending of Gravik’s defeat to the President saying we’ll kill all Skrulls, and the montage of vigilante violence, was way too quick for me.  I wish the show took a breath to actually explore what was happening, and the repercussions of all this!!  Instead they blew by it all.

It’s a strange choice to me that the show ends at a point of chaos like that!!  Where will this story continue?  Are we going to see a happy Fury in The Marvels and ignore all this?  Carol Danvers is complicit too in all this — she also failed to help the Skrulls!  Will The Marvels address that?  Will that film pick up on any of these story threads?  I’m curious to see…

Other thoughts:

• I wish I had more to say about Emilia Clarke (Game of Thrones) as G’iah.  I was excited for Khaleesi to enter the MCU!  But G’iah isn’t much of a character here.  She has a lot of screen time, but I didn’t feel we got to know her beyond the superficial.
• Why wasn’t Fury wearing an eyepatch for most of the season?  Was it just to give us the moment of his putting the patch back on at the end?  I wanted more of an in-show reason for that.  (At first I thought maybe his damaged eye had been repaired by some sort of tech on the mentioned-but-never-seen S.A.B.E.R. space station.  In some shots I thought his eye looked normal, while in other shots it looks glassy.)
• Speaking of S.A.B.E.R., I wish they would have better defined what S.A.B.E.R. is.  I assume S.A.B.E.R. is sort of a space-based version of S.H.I.E.LD… or is it just the name for the space station?  How does S.A.B.E.R. connect to S.W.O.R.D., that was introduced back in WandaVision?  Is S.W.O.R.D. the agency and S.A.B.E.R. the space station?  Also, why is there a space-version of S.H.I.E.L.D. and no terrestrial version?  It’s felt weird to me for a while now that Fury or someone else hasn’t tried to recreate S.H.I.E.L.D.  Getting back to S.A.B.E.R., I’d have liked to have actually seen the space station they kept talking about.  (We’ve been seeing shots of it for months in the trailer for The Marvels, so why not slip a shot of it into the show?  Sort of how they put a shot of the Damage Control prison, that was created for the She-Hulk show, into the Ms. Marvel show…)
• I still dislike the ending of Endgame that didn’t erase the five-years later jump, though since they went there, I am happy to see Marvel continuing to explore the fallout of those world-shaking events.  It seems silly to be calling the snap “the blip” though.  That felt like a “let’s all agree not to discuss this ever again” joke in Spider-Man: Far From Home, which was a movie that basically ignored the blip.  If we’re not going to ignore it, still calling it the blip feels incongruous to me.
• Ending episode three with G’iah’s “death” (reversed at the start of episode four) and then ending episode four with Talos’ death felt lame to me.  It was basically the same ending two episodes in a row.
• I liked seeing Mason from Black Widow.  That was a fun surprise.  (But it’s such a minor-level cameo I don’t think it landed with the impact the makers of the show might have hoped for…)
• Did this show have the worst opening credits of a Marvel show ever?  Blech! Ugly A.I.-created nonsense.

I respect what Marvel set out to do with this show.   I loved seeing Samuel Jackson’s Nick Fury get to lead this show, and I enjoyed the concept of a paranoia-fueled spy thriller in the MCU.  (Once again the people who say all these Marvel superhero movies & shows are exactly the same don’t know what they’re talking about.)  Each episode had good scenes and moments in it.  But as a whole it didn’t live up to my hopes.  This was mediocre when it should’ve been mind-bending and thrilling.

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