Invasion on Apple TV is a new sci-fi series, premiering on October 22nd. Ordinary folks around the world experience the early moments of an alien invasion in different ways in a 10-episode drama from Simon Kinberg and David Weil. Earth is visited by an alien species that threatens humanity’s existence. Events unfold in real time through the eyes of five ordinary people across the globe as they struggle to make sense of the chaos unraveling around them. View the Invasion trailer below:
It starts in rural America, where a God-fearing sheriff on his last day on the job (Sam Neill) ponders whether his life has had purpose, and then gets way more of a mission than he could possibly have hoped for when a crop circle (that old chestnut) appears in a corn field where a couple of meth-head farm boys were last seen.
The impact and devastation, though, is global, our lens on it fractured across multiple storylines and locations, allowing for different approaches to the central question of what it would mean for the planet to be invaded. On Long Island, we meet Aneesha (Golshifteh Farahani), who set aside her medical aspirations to raise her two kids (Azhy Robertson and Tara Moayedi) with her hunky hubby (Firas Nassar). A bullied London teen (Billy Barratt’s Casper) has epilepsy, while Trevante (Shamier Anderson) is a distracted American soldier in Afghanistan. Finally, over in Japan, aerospace engineer Mitsuki (Shioli Kutsuna) is all kinds of mopey because her astronaut girlfriend (Rinko Kikuchi, confirming those Babel vibes) is off for a jaunt at the International Space Station. In the UK, a school bus goes off a cliff and into a giant pit, killing the only adult on board and leaving the kids to work out the new rules of survival in this grave new world.
The storylines is tied into the strange events, and they all have vague links to the series’ ongoing themes, like when an Afghan citizen explains to Trevante that the locals are accustomed to outside invasions. Get it? Eventually, each narrative thread becomes its own all-too-familiar take on the alien invasion genre, one aggressively paying homage to War of the Worlds, another trying to channel Stranger Things, another playing off Arrival.
Invasion on Apple TV Cast
Azhy Robertson as Luke Malik
Tara Moayedi as Sarah Malik
Daisuke Tsuji as Kaito Kawaguchi
Billy Barratt as Casper Morrow
India Brown as Jamila Huston
Paddy Holland as Montgomery (Monty) Cuttermill
Cache Vanderpuye as Alfie Ademura
Togo Igawa as Ikuro Murai
Louis Toghill as Darwin Charles
Tom Cullen as Mr. Edwards
Isla Johnston as Lucy Spencer
India Jane Francis as Poppy Rees
Max Fincham as Jerome Hall
Isaac Heslip as Liam Davies
Stanley Lane as Rupert Bailey
Krish Misra as Tupac
Aiyana Goodfellow as Fara Aminah
Noah Bean as David Barton
