Maryland J. Koba here, wiping cracker crumbs off of my mouth. I spent the past two nights watching "Invasion" while eating crackers - there was sure enough CHEESE to go around! Yikes! This sucker was about at the level of late-night TSFC movies. Like a friend of mine on another list said, "I caught it the first time, when it was called V." ;) I also caught it this summer, when it was called Independence Day. To think that I taped The X-Files and watched this turkey! Sheesh!
Rebecca, without her trademark curly hair, was back in the desert, only with her fiancee, played by 90210-boy Luke Perry. He picks up a mysterious rock in a parking lot, and all hell breaks loose. Most of Phoenix, AZ, gets a piece of the rock, and get infected with an alien virus that makes their eyes glow and makes them slaves to Luke Perry. Now we know how the Heavens Gate cultists did it! They got a piece of the rock! Was it just me, or did Rebecca look more like a grown-up Maddie Wright with her straight hair? She sure perfected her "wide-eyed look of total fear" this outing. Between that, and the gratuitous sex scenes with 90210-Boy, she really doesn't have much to brag about. Although, she did play a very strong, Bess-like character who wound up saving the Earth from the aliens. In her defense, there's only so much a good actor can do with bad writing and directing (reference Roy Scheider in "SeaPest").
Okay, so now to the real star of the show - the makeup and special effects. Again, since this was a big-budget miniseries, I was expecting really killer SFX. Not so. Your average episode of Deep Space 9, Babylon 5, or Voyager provides better visuals. The alien spaceship looked like something out of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, only 20 years ago, it looked impressive. 90210-Boy's transformation into an alien looked remarkably like The Phage from the first two seasons of ST:V, or Tom Paris getting turned into a newt from the ultimate ST:V embarrassment episode, "Threshold". It should be of note that NONE of the makeup and SFX people listed in the credits was recognizable to the KOBA-TV staff, which are dedicated SF geeks.
Only good line:
Pitt - "Great. Of all people to hook up with, we find an alien conspiracy theorist"
John - "This is an alien conspiracy."
In short, Maryland J. Koba gives In-V-asion one alien rock out of five, and that's being generous. Just don't pick up the rock. You might get bitten by a killer mutant alien virus and get turned into a mindless zombie that watches NBC... ;)
Back to the KOBA-TV Home Page.