2023 was a bad year for the MCU and Disney in general. I thought we had hit rock bottom with "Quantumania," but then came the big summer miniseries event on Disney+, "Secret Invasion," which the MCU has been building up to for a while. It reportedly cost as much as one of the theatrical releases, but the end result is so much worse. Created by Kyle Bradstreet and largely written by Brian Tucker, "Secret Invasion" is supposed to be a showcase for Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) and the other military characters like Maria Hill (Cobie Smulders) and James Rhodes (Don Cheadle). It's based on a comics storyline where the Skrulls, alien shapeshifters, infiltrate the government and the superhero community. In the series, this also involves a rift among the Skrulls themselves, between their hopeful leader Talos (Ben Mendelsohn) and a splinter group led by an extremist, Gravik (Kingsley Ben-Adir), and Talos's estranged daughter G'iah (Emilia Clarke, playing another character with a terrible superfluous-apostrophe name).
"Secret Invasion," is a mess from the beginning for several reasons. One of them is that unlike other MCU shows, "Secret Universe" is oddly disconnected from the rest of the Marvel universe. There are only about ten characters of any importance, half of them introduced in "Secret Invasion" itself, which really limits how many big reveals you can have about which characters are secretly Skrulls. And the reveals are the whole point, right? Another problem is that the scope of the show consistently feels very small, despite the focus on geopolitics and globetrotting. Most of the budget was apparently spent on the action scenes and CGI, which are perfectly fine for what they are. However, there's an awful lot of the show that's just scenes of tense conversations in cars or alleyways, and feel weirdly cheap.
Good writing might have helped make up for some of these deficiencies, but it's in short supply. Similar to "The Falcon and the Winter Soldier," the show never figures out a way to connect the action with the more personal stories of Nick Fury and Talos, or to make us care about the crisis. Big things happen in this series! Major characters die! We get to meet Mrs. Fury (Charlayne Woodard) at last! The fate of the planet is at stake! However, it's very difficult to follow the narrative, because everyone's motives are so muddled, and everything always feels rushed so that the big reveals have no time to land. The fake-outs and double crosses don't work because the characters' actions often don't make sense. Kevin Feige discussed in promo materials how some of the Skrull reveals had been planned long in advance, so you could go back and rewatch other shows and movies and see where familiar characters were actually switched out. But after having seen "Secret Invasion," where every reveal was so heavily telegraphed, and barely anything made a difference to the outcome, who would bother?
As with many of these MCU stumbles, I understand what kind of series the creators thought they were making. There's a very compelling idea for a Fury story here, where he has to come back to Earth to confront all of his past sins - broken promises to his friends, personal issues with his family, a crisis of self-confidence - and become a badass again. However, trying to do this at the same time as making a paranoid spy thriller, with the Skrulls as a sympathetic stand-in for a dispossessed outgroup, seems to have been too much for "Secret Invasion" to handle. Maybe getting Brie Larsen to make an appearance as Captain Marvel would have helped, but the cast that was assembled here - including Olivia Goddamned Colman as an MI6 agent who is the best goddamned thing about this show - suggests otherwise. I have never seen so many clearly talented, committed actors trying so hard to save material that doesn't work.
Maybe I shouldn't have bothered writing this review, but I sat through all six episodes of "Secret Invasion" absolutely dumbstruck by how badly this show came out, and I feel I'm owed a good spleen venting. Not all of Disney's bombs and flops this year were deserved, but this one definitely was.
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