The disappearance of Havaa’s father comes near the end of a 10-year sequence of similar events that have devastated the tiny village of Eldar.
This novel is, among other things, a meditation on the use and abuse of history, and an inquiry into the extent to which acts of memory may also constitute acts of survival.įor Marra’s characters, the odds against survival are high. Marra’s timeline runs from 1994 to 2004, but the larger story is much, much deeper. In the background are the Chechen wars, a staggeringly destructive pair of conflicts pitting the army of post-Soviet Russia against Chechen guerrillas who were sometimes supported by visiting Arab jihadis.
And yet, as “Invasion” hops from storyline to storyline to yet another storyline, its blunt dialogue and characterizations fail to make any of its disparate threads as immediately compelling as its scattered narrative needs to stay afloat.Anthony Marra’s extraordinary first novel, “A Constellation of Vital Phenomena,” opens with a disappearance typical of postmodern warfare, cobbled to an image completely alien to it: “On the morning after the Feds burned down her house and took her father, Havaa woke from dreams of sea anemones.” This fusion of the desperate with the whimsical sets the tone. The urge to include as many perspectives as possible is an understandable one, especially when you’re working with the kind of budget and reach that a backer like Apple can offer. Some characters appear in all three episodes others get dropped to make room for others that crop up out of nowhere so that the show can bring in more story from more countries to complete its broad picture.
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Kutsuna is excellent in both Mitsuki’s most defiant and most devastated moments her embodiment of Mitsuki’s doomed love story feels developed enough that it’s easy to imagine a series entirely about her rather than one in which she’s a single spoke on a much larger wheel. The most intriguing - not to mention well-acted - segment of the first three episodes belongs to Shioli Kutsuna’s Mitsuki, a Japanese aerospace technician determined to understand why her astronaut lover’s spaceship seemed to suddenly implode.
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The second episode then introduces two more characters and settings with Trevante (Shamier Anderson), an American soldier stationed in the vague Middle Eastern desert that TV and film loves so much, and Caspar (Billy Barratt), a British kid whose school bus ends up veering over a cliff to strand his class “Lord of the Flies” style at the bottom of a ravine. Aneesha and her children (played by Tara Moayedi and an increasingly familiar Azhy Robertson) get enough screen time in the series’ opening chapters that it’s clear she’s meant to be as close to a purely emotional anchor as “Invasion” has unfortunately, she’s also caught in a circular marriage drama that traps Aneesha and Farahani both in a repetitive loop of simmering frustration, not to mention stilted dialogue that keeps either from feeling particularly real. There’s Aneesha (Golshifteh Farahani), a Syrian immigrant and mother who has the bad luck to find out her husband (Firas Nassar) is cheating on her right as the Something hits their American suburb with a vengeance. There’s a small town sheriff ( Sam Neill), teetering on the brink of retirement as his trusty deputy (DeWanda Wise) looks on in worry. From co-creators Simon Kinberg (“The Martian”) and David Weil (Amazon Prime’s “Hunters” and “Solos”), “Invasion” does its level best to paint a broad portrait of a planet in crisis from several perspectives.
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