The Skrulls were introduced in Captain Marvel. Talos (Ben Mendelsohn) represented the friendly face of this extraterrestrial race that can change physical form, giving them the ability to impersonate another person if they see fit. Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) promised the community of Talos that he would find them a new home where they could live in freedom after being victims of an attempted genocide, but after Thanos snapped his fingers, the SHIELD leader entered a crisis. existential and abandoned his obligations.
This brings us to the premise of Secret Invasion, the Marvel production that Disney opens this Wednesday. Fed up with living anonymously on planet Earth, posing as humans, a faction of the Skrulls has taken action. Without anyone noticing, they have kidnapped and impersonated key politicians from the most relevant governments in the world, raising the tension of the planet in an almost imperceptible way.
Do the political parties seem to you to be tense and that your representatives sweat anger and a complete lack of responsibility? They are the Skrulls who have a plan on their hands: to end humanity and have the planet for themselves after the empty promises of a Nick Fury who did not watch over his rights and kept them as second-class citizens on the planet. The inaction did not have a bit of bad faith but, for those who suffered ostracism and the reduction of freedoms, it was an insult.
It cannot be said that Secret Invasion does not have something to say. Kyle Bradstreet, who makes his debut as a creator after writing in series like Copper, Berlin Station or Mr Robot, brings the Marvel Cinematic Universe to the spy thriller as he had already done Captain America: The Winter Soldier with a script by Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely. The underlying theme (or, well, on the surface) is clear: the ineffectiveness of Western democracies in the face of refugee crises is denounced and the way in which they can become radicalized in the face of the indifference of some states to which they are brought to I stand by your human rights.
As if the cast could help to give this patina of seriousness to the project, Bradstreet has a powerful cast. Samuel L. Jackson has his first full lead role since he entered the Marvel universe in the Iron Man post-credits titles in 2009. Mendelsohn, an ever-remarkable screen presence, reprises as Talos. Martin Freeman, known for both The Hobbit and Sherlock, lends himself to a brief role in the first episode.
Emilia Clarke from Game of Thrones, on the other hand, is awarded the most dramatic and emotional part while Oscar winner Olivia Colman has fun displaying a more adult sense of humor. The gift that this woman has to bring the characters to her acting style, so characteristic, making them work wonderfully is worthy of study.
The downside is that, despite having a theme to ponder, Secret Invasion suffers from Marvel Syndrome. The characters are perceived more as instruments in a script room than as people (that illusion that is the power of stories). The Skrull conspiracy does not have enough ingenuity and does not have characters to get along with beyond the intellectual plane and its parallelism with our present. The direction, for example, doesn’t even seek to create tension in such important scenes as a terrorist attack, as if it were afraid of going into excessively adult territory. The ambition to create a more adult story is noticeable at the same time as the limitations of the mold and the potential of the story are glimpsed if it did not belong in this fictional universe. He does not dare to take that emancipatory and much-needed step forward.
And, as it is framed in this universe, it is intuited as an incomplete or minor work, a common defect in almost all Marvel works. How can it be that after more than a decade almost every movie or series in this franchise is presented as a paperwork? It is curious that what worked before, due to saturation and the lack of backbone grandiloquence of The Avengers headed by Robert Downey Jr, now remains indifferent. Secret Invasion on paper should be a phenomenon and, instead, settles for being a correct but impersonal pastime.
