Marvel would like to sit at the grownups’ table. Pretty please?
That desperate plea can be felt throughout “Marvel’s Secret Invasion,” the latest superhero series from the mega-franchise to hit Disney+. This isn’t the wham-bam, whizzy-fizzy kids’ stuff of Marvel past, the literally and figuratively dark series promises. This one is about politics. It’s about identity. It’s about espionage. It takes place in Russia, for goodness sakes. It must be serious.
Unfortunately, the six-episode miniseries “Invasion” (streaming Wednesdays, ★ out of four) fails in its aspirations to be Marvel for adults, mostly because it’s difficult to figure out what’s going on in any given scene. Whether you think the Marvel take on “Jason Bourne” is actually more mature and sophisticated than what came before it is immaterial, because it’s hard to tell who the so-called grownups are in the room. Sure. there’s Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson), the great-grandaddy of Marvel cinematic universe aspirations. But as charismatic and talented as Jackson is, his presence alone is not enough to carry a show weighed down by its own self-importance.
The first two episodes made available for review are a whirlwind of characters, locations, fights and bombs, with very little stitching it all together. It is (somewhat) established that Fury, a former secret agent who’s now a freelance good guy, is allied with “good” shape-shifting alien Skrulls (including Ben Mendelsohn’s Talos) against some very bad ones.
Those evil Skrulls are led by Gravik (Kingsley Ben-Adir), and they want to take over the world and make it a new Skrull paradise. (They lost their home world a few decades ago, and “Invasion” assumes you memorized the plot of 2019’s “Captain Marvel.”)
Fury and his secret agent team (including Cobie Smulders and Martin Freeman) must stop the bad Skrulls from doing some very bad stuff, like starting World War III or worse, corrupting Talos’ daughter G’iah (Emilia Clarke). Omnipresent Olivia Colman is there too, chewing up scenery as a less-than-ethical MI-6 agent who belongs in an entirely different TV show.
But left unclear is why Fury was hanging out at a space station at the start of the series, why some Skrulls are evil and others aren’t, how they’ve managed to accomplish their secret invasion in the face of a dozen or so Avengers kicking around and why any single character in this series is worth caring about.
“Invasion” is a collection of moods, not stories or characters. Fight scenes race ahead of any dialogue explaining them, faces jump in and out of the story without establishing a lick of background. Perhaps it would all make sense to a Marvel devotee who not only watched the previous movies and series but also took copious notes. But for a newbie or even the casually acquainted fan, “Invasion” is a pop quiz we’re destined to fail.
“Invasion” is emblematic of the problem of modern-day Marvel: It’s a franchise full of waste. It wastes the talent of the A-list actors it manages to lure into its clutches. Clarke, a force to be reckoned with on eight seasons of “Game of Thrones,” sleepwalks through her scenes, barely wasting time on facial expressions. It’s a waste of the source material, too. The comics storyline on which the series is based is a beloved and acclaimed thriller, but its adaptation has been squeezed of all intrigue and nuance. And more than anything, “Invasion” is a waste of the time for the viewer.
Lured by the promise of the stars, the aliens and the Marvel brand, they’ll leave only with a fuzzy head and six hours gone.
Samuel L. Jackson returns:All about Marvel’s new Disney+ paranoia thriller ‘Secret Invasion’
