This series grew on me, although at first I had a lot of doubts. There was a lot of seemingly irrational behavior (i.e. haven't they seen enough sci fi movies to know you can't just shoot at aliens who have super-duper technology and expect to destroy them out that way?). There were also clichéd, corny touches that made me think "Oh no, not another Hollywood film." For example, the scientist bringing her little daughter to the military post seemed to be a setup for "We've got to rescue a kid/child in peril"; there was the usual "Nobody believes the scientists," as well as other manufactured internal conflicts; and, in the "mother of all clichés," initially the aliens were shown to be of the low-budget sort, humans with faces painted white. However (SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER) it ultimately turned every cliché on its head. The aliens were inscrutable and unfathomable, and ultimately there was no way to defeat them, despite the various self-sacrifices and heroics which, in a Hollywood flick, would've saved the day just in the nick of time. No such luck here - SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER - with the brilliant and quirky computer guy's attempt to communicate turning him into alien lunch (or whatever it was they were doing with humans); the pilot's act of derring-do just bringing on another alien "planet shatterer"; the self-sacrificing scientist, morphing into an alien hybrid and offering herself as a guinea pig for deciphering the alien's science, just dying for nothing. Ultimately it was the stuff of nightmares achieved with a minimum of gratuitous gore. I salute it for its unrelenting repudiation of standard Hollywood sci fi clichés.
Review of Invasion Earth
