Invasion
“Invasion” is a film that gets to the anxiety of being suddenly at war while also being action movie nonsense. Much like American films such as “Red Dawn” (the original) and “Invasion U.S.A.,” it taps into fears of outsiders taking over our home, but Bobby Boermans’s film doesn’t necessarily try to explain the political climate in the film until after the action starts. In that way, it actually has its priorities straight, in my opinion.
This movie begins on two fronts- first, there’s a raid of a ship suspected of carrying drugs by the authorities. Meanwhile, the neighboring country of Veragua attacks Curacao and Aruba, taking the Dutch government by surprise. Meanwhile, military forces try to fight back, and three Naval recruits need to figure out what to do next.
There’s a lot to be said about how “Invasion” simply leans into being an all-out action thriller. Yes, we get some politics, but Boermans seems to understand that, if you’re watching a film like this, you want action, and he delivers that. There are a handful of characters that nominally become “main characters” (namely, Andy (Tarikh Janssen), a soldier whose father was injured in the attack), but there’s nothing of depth in any of them. This is all about the action, and that can be a good thing or a bad thing. Here, I think it’s good, mainly because it keeps out expectations low of what to expect.
While of course we’d like movies to have substance more often than not, the fact is cinema has always found space for shallow entertainment, going all the way back to the creation of the medium. I appreciate that there are times when filmmakers seem to just lean into that to create something we can enjoy. The problem is when one piece- be it a sense of intelligence in narrative flow or filmmaking craft- gets in the way; that is when we start to wonder whether we’ve wasted our time with a genre film. Boermans is a smart enough filmmaker to keep the narrative moving, and he has the chops as a filmmaker to keep the film going, and as such, that is part of why I’m so pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed “Invasion.” The film knows how to build its story, when to introduce individual character arcs, and how to use filmmaking techniques to keep us invested just enough to keep going with the film. Does that mean I will remember any of it next week? Not necessarily, but I do not feel like my time was wasted by “Invasion.” If you’re a fan of straightforward action films, I don’t think you will, either.
