Invasion: Earth


So, I recently finished watching Invasion: Earth a BBC miniseries from 1998 about, you guessed it, the invasion of Earth. Basically, without boring you with small details that I couldn't understand even when I was cold sober, a lonely part of Scotland (and which part isn't?) has become the focal point for the invasion of Earth, because, let's face it, that's as exotic a filming locale as you're going to get for a low budget BBC miniseries.

So there's these friendly aliens, fighting the bad aliens, and their conflict lands on Earth. The friendly aliens soon lose, though, and now Earth is in the crossfire. The bad aliens, who actually exist in the 4th dimension, are going to suck the life out of earth. That is, if bad acting doesn't suck the life out of the viewer first. There's a bunch of characters, with strange accents that might be British or Scottish or Irish or Welsh. My favorite though has to be the American. The American is a high ranking dude sent by NATO to oversee the landing of the alien spacecraft. You're never told the American is American, but he sure sounds like a poor man's Clint Eastwood and acts like a bold asshole American, though in the end his true grit kind of saves the day and he makes all the tough decisions after much hand wringing and shouting. Honestly, I wonder if the director told the cast before every shot that they needed to BE DRAMATIC PEOPLE, JUST BE DRAMATIC.

To make an incoherent review short, let's just say Invasion: Earth is mostly about people yelling at each other about aliens and if they may or may not be about to fuck Earth up with some cheap special effects thrown in, Dr. Who style, the most notable effect being an enormous gray purple black mountain thing that appears outside of town and starts swallowing everything around it, like the Blob, or Dick Cheney's soul.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Um...why did you watch it in the first place?

David Oppegaard said...

Good question, Todd. It was free, at the library! And it, was, huh, something to do?

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