“I Was There Trying to Stop the Attack.” “Well, Great Job on That.”
I go into every new Marvel project hoping for the best. But it seems like they are very hit or miss these days. While I wouldn’t say that Secret Invasion was a complete miss, it definitely could have been better for me.
The story focuses on Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) as he learns of an imminent invasion of Skrulls. If, like me, you’d forgotten just exactly who these aliens are, they are shape shifters who landed on Earth decades ago looking for a new home world. Fury had promised to help them, but some Skrulls, lead by Gravik (Kingsley Ben-Adir), are tired of waiting. They plan to take over Earth from the humans. They’ve been at this plan for a while, infiltrating the highest levels of government all over the world. Will Fury be able to stop them?
Yes, the Skrulls have been introduced in previous Marvel movies. And this brings me to my first issue, and it is a personal issue. I can’t remember all the characters and aliens that’s we’ve met over the course of the various movies and shows. It would help if I went back and watched them all again, but since I haven’t taken the time to do that, I miss some of these connections and the background. There were several times that I know I was supposed to feel something with what happened during the story, but it meant little to me because I didn’t remember the background of most of the characters were outside of Nick Fury.
My other complaint is another common complaint of mine with the Marvel shows. There was a good story here, but it didn’t need to be a six episodes TV show. The result was something that was dragged out. Yes, there were some good plot points and action scenes here, but they could have edited it down and presented it as a movie and it would have been stronger. This is especially true given how long some of their movies are running these days.
I will say this for the show. I often worry when dealing with a shape shifting foe that we are going to constantly have to watch out for characters sometimes being themselves and sometimes being a shape shifter. And we had some of that, don’t get me wrong. But it wasn’t over played here, so when it was done, it was done effectively to further the story.
And yes, there was a good story here; it was just buried under all this extra stuff that should have been pruned away. Maybe four episodes would have sufficed if it couldn’t be cut down to movie length.
None of this is a reflection on the actors, who all do a good job of bringing their characters to life. Likewise, the special effects were good. Yes, there were moments where the effects were obvious, but for the most part I bought what we saw. And I definitely enjoyed the stunts and action sequences.
As I’ve been saying, Secret Invasion was okay at best. The series should have been more focused to really keep our attention.
Yep! I agree with all of this. :)
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