Marvel’s Secret Invasion is not what it appeared to be

Marvel’s Secret Invasion, promises a high-stakes shell game of subterfuge and suspense, building on elements of Captain Marvel and Spider-Man: Far From Home to explore in more depth the plight of the MCU’s Skrulls, whose scattered refugee race are worlds away from their mighty comic book counterparts. Packing in a cast including the likes of Emilia Clarke, Kingsley Ben-Adir, Olivia Colman and Ben Mendelsohn, led of course by Samuel L Jackson and featuring fan-favourite cameos from Colbie Smulders, Martin Freeman and Don Cheadle, the board is well set for one of Marvel’s most popular storylines to be embraced by the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Unfortunately, Secret Invasion flatters to deceive and in revealing its true self delivers possibly the MCU’s lowest ebb to date.

Nick Fury, the enigmatic puppeteer behind many of the MCU’s greatest moments, returns from space to an Earth in the grip of global geopolitical instability, an instability that has been nurtured and exacerbated by a faction of the shape-shifting Skrulls who have embedded themselves within the very fabric of every nation’s political, military and industrial institutions. The opening episode, while setting the stage, also provides a warning of what’s to come, with an uneven and ill-fitting arrangement of kinetic action and slow-burn tension with a little too much exposition sitting awkwardly side by side with contrived inscrutability to maintain the suspense for a run of episodes that feels about twice as long as a story this thin needs. In the absence of real dramatic heft, Secret Invasion settles for shock value instead but the first episode’s cliffhanger is a spectacular misfire which disengages rather than delights the audience as Maria Hill is summarily dismissed with in a manner so unceremoniously abrupt that it feels grossly disrespectful to a character who’s been a Marvel mainstay for over ten years.

Part of the problem of Secret Invasion, apart from the fact it doesn’t ever seem that invasive – or secret for that matter, is that it almost immediately sidelines Nick Fury, reducing him from Machiavellian mastermind to reactive old man, trying to keep up with the potentially explosive ramifications of a Skrull civil war that the audience never gets enough information or time to care that much about. The absence of any really big MCU names becoming enmeshed in the worldwide imitation game similarly undercuts the stakes as the only people the Skrulls seem to be intent on targeting are ones we’ve never met before and will likely never meet again. The two sides of the Skrull’s conflict are personified in G’iah, portrayed by Emilia Clarke (still searching for a role that justifies the breakout Games Of Thrones hype), and Gravik, played with lazy malevolence by Kingsley Ben-Adir. The pair form the emotional and ideological fulcrum around which the plot pivots, yet their characters remain frustratingly underdeveloped, their motivations shallow and occasionally arbitrary. Clarke, in particular, is saddled with a resentful daughter subplot which doesn’t really do much apart from delay the inevitable plot points she exists to serve while Ben-Adir’s Gravik, a villain with the potential to rival the MCU’s best, is rendered repeatedly impotent by a script that stifles his menace.

There’s a bleakness to the colour palate of Secret Wars that seems to have infected the cast and crew and drained the joy out of the whole thing. I get that it’s trying to deal with a fantastical plot with seriousness and gravitas, but I have to think there’s a better tone to adopt than ‘clinically depressed Scandi-Noir’. Throughout all six episodes, Olivia Colman’s the only one who seems to be enjoying herself. Sonya Falsworth ( a surname that points to comic book significance even though she herself is an MCU creation) provides a spark of intrigue and amusement as her MI6 agent embarks on a mission of her own to protect King and Country from the Skrull menace but it’s a shame because she often feels like she’s in a different story altogether and her interactions with Fury himself, although terrific when they occur, are too few and far between to make her feel like she’s part of the main narrative. Like Ben-Adir, it feels like Secret Invasion spends her MCU potential too cheaply while paying too high a price in the departures of the aforementioned Smulders and, of course, Mendelsohn himself.

The six-episode series suffers most, though, from pacing that can only be described as glacial. The urgency and paranoia that should accompany a plot about an alien takeover is conspicuously absent, replaced by a languid progression that tests the viewer’s patience. The stakes, theoretically astronomical, feel curiously muted, each episode an exercise in unfulfilled promise. The motivations of the characters, be they human or Skrull, are muddled and poorly articulated, leaving their actions feeling unmoored, their goals nebulous and the whole series feeling like a slog.

Of course, behind the scenes, Secret Invasion didn’t have the smoothest of productions, woes that undoubtedly left their mark on the final product. Initial head writer Kyle Bradstreet’s departure, replaced by Brian Tucker, signalled a creative discord that don’t seem to have healed. This turmoil, compounded by the logistical nightmares of the coronavirus pandemic, resulted in a project that lacked a cohesive and even at times coherent vision. The series stumbled through a series of rewrites, reshoots, and directorial changes, with Thomas Bezucha stepping down and Ali Selim taking the reins, a baton passed with neither grace nor consistency while the choice to utilise an AI-generated title sequence during the 2023 Writers Guild of America strike just leaves a bad taste in the mouth.

The pandemic’s shadow looms large over the production, manifesting in delayed schedules and a palpable sense of disarray. Actors juggled commitments, and new line producers and managers were brought in, all trying to steady a ship that seemed perpetually on the verge of capsizing. It’s little wonder, then, that the series struggles with an identity crisis, its tone and pace as inconsistent as its behind-the-scenes leadership. None of the main cast seem to be operating within the same production, their performances disjointed and at odds with each other.

In its climactic moments, the series grasps for a resolution that might redeem its earlier missteps, yet it falls short. The final showdown between Fury, G’iah and Gravik lacks the cathartic release one might hope for, a muted crescendo to a symphony that never quite finds its harmony. Adding insult to injury, the revelations and plotlines left dangling at the series’ end play no part in the conspicuously Skrull-heavy The Marvels movie which followed, leaving viewers with a sense of Secret Invasion’s narrative cul-de-sac.

In retrospect, perhaps more than any other Marvel Disney+ series, Secret Invasion was the wrong story to tell in a short form television series. Its potential and ramifications are so significant it could and should have been an entire phase of the cinematic universe itself, its very nature lending itself perfectly to a slow drip of suspicion and teases through a series of films that culminates in the all-out fight against the creeping invasion. Instead, we got a bleak, lifeless six-hour snoozefest that wastes characters old and new for little gain.