Secret Invasion TV Series Review: After a hiatus of more than 300 days, the Marvel Cinematic Universe returns to Disney+ for its first series of Phase 5: Secret Invasion. Available from June 21 on the platform, with one episode a week for six weeks, the series is inspired by the homonymous rum by Brian Michael Bendis in which the alien race metaphor of the Skrulls secretly occupies the most important public positions on the whole Earth, putting place of heads of state and governmental bodies of their members who assume their guise.

Secret Invasion, from the comic to the series

From this assumption, the series, written by Kyle Bradstreet, unfolds in what we bet will be an independent story compared to the comics but which, already from the first two episodes, clearly clarifies the tones and themes that he intends to address. The protagonist of this new Casa delle Idee show is Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson), who has returned to Earth, a little battered and aged, after a long interlude in space. 

To summon it is Talos (Ben Mendelsohn), the Skrull who has (and we have) known during the story told in Captain Marvel and who in the thirty years since their first meeting has built a house and a family on Earth. The former SHIELD leader takes the field again to stop that “secret invasion” and silence that threatens to undermine the order of life on Earth forever.

The echo of Captain America: The Winter Soldier

Secret Invasion immediately follows in the wake of Captain America: The Winter Soldier, both in terms of storytelling style and content. On the one hand, the series has a very realistic look, on a human scale, because the point of view we adopt is that of Samuel L. Jackson’s character, who after 15 years continues to instill a charismatic and charming character in his Nick, on the other hand, the very nature of the threat represented by the Skrulls who take the place of people, especially in roles of power, delivers that atmosphere of uncertainty and mistrust that had been the distinctive feature of that moment, in the MCU, represented precisely by The Winter Soldier, in which the foundations of the world were shaken by the earthquake caused by the revelation that the Hydra had survived and infiltrated SHIELD itself.

Nick Fury in Secret Invasion

Lucidly and carefully, the Marvel series approaches highly topical issues through the fantasy tale of superheroes and super spies. Information is no longer truth and power but generates distrust as if one of the great evils of our world has also been absorbed by the fictional world of the MCU. In a war between spies, it was inevitable to involve Nick Fury, who in this field is perhaps the greatest authority that has ever trod the Marvel stage. 

Well, without losing a shred of his charm, but showing his wounds and weaknesses, his tiredness with humanity and sensitivity, the Fury of Secret Invasion is almost a twilight hero, called to carry out his last mission, before retiring, and it doesn’t matter that he has a bad knee.

And always he, thanks to his friendship with Talos, is the architect of a bridge between different species that would like to occupy the same territory. Because if it is true that the Skrull world has been destroyed, it is also true that this metaphorical alien population has the right to a new home. The problem that Secret Invasion arises, at least in the version told on TV, therefore, is also that of welcome and coexistence, of acceptance of the other.

A skilled spy and friend of the Skrulls, Nick Fury seems just the right man to carry out this mission and try to stem an invasion that actually seems inexorable and perhaps already total.

Secret Invasion Cast

In this new series of six episodes Fury and Talos are not the only two familiar faces that we find. With them there is also Maria Hill (Cobie Smulders), Fury’s right arm, with whom, however, he seems to have an unfinished business; there is also room for Everett Ross (Martin Freeman), who we left in his kitchen in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever and for Colonel Rhodes (Don Cheadle), who however seems to have embarked on a political career that distances him greatly from the Rhodey who we know. The new entries are interesting, if only because they have the faces of Emilia Clarke and Olivia Colman, for different reasons, much loved by the public, who propose two very different characters, all to be discovered.

OVERVIEW

Secret Invasion seems to be a return in style for Marvel’s Disney + series, perhaps a change of pace compared to what has been seen up to now in Marvel Universe TV, certainly a product capable of arousing the curiosity and attention of an audience perhaps saturated.