
It’s time for a sci-fi film where the aliens decide to finally take out humanity. Trust me I knew this day was coming because humanity definitely was never going to last long against aliens. Aliens are more resilient, skilled, and just generally trickier than humans. These guys are invisible though which makes it even tougher. It’s a good movie with a fairly cheesy ending but on the whole I had a good time here.
The movie starts off with a scientist dying. After that, he suddenly appears in the house of another scientist and explains that his body is being reanimated by an alien. These aliens give the Earth 24 hours to surrender before they take over. The humans don’t believe this of course and so they don’t do anything. After the 24 hours pass, the aliens begin shooting up all of the national landmarks and overwhelming the humans. There doesn’t seem to be a way to stop them because the invisibility means they can get into any secure location or snipe people at will. So America puts all of their hopes on two scientists, Penner and Lamont. Only they can hope to save the day but will they find a solution in time?
Now the humans are rather lucky here in that the aliens have no real weapons. See, apparently Earth’s atmosphere is rather toxic to them so they have to stay invisible and use sabotage to take the edge against the human. Sabotage is in itself still a very good tactic so we shouldn’t underestimate it but that also means it is their only win condition. If the humans can find a way to make them visible then they will be able to end this in a snap. A hard, but achievable task.
Unfortunately one of the scientists is super annoying. Lamont is one of those guys who throws in the towel immediately and complains a whole lot. Seriously this guy is just a nuisance and he goes as far as to start destroying equipment all over the base while he has a tantrum. It’s one thing to figure you have no shot but it’s another to make sure of it like this. He wanted to force a surrender and while the other characters let him off easy, I would have considered that as a complete betrayal and kicked him off the squad. You can’t have someone like that putting you in danger. He never recovered from that.
Penner is actually a good scientist who tries hard the whole time. Even when things look bleak, he continues to fight hard and holds his own. It’s not an easy thing to do but he still does it. He lives up to his reputation as one of the biggest geniuses in the country and ultimately he takes a lot of risks of his own. Then you have the main heroine Phyllis who does her best to assist. She may not be making inventions but she watches over the crew. Mainly the tough part for her is having to deal with some flirting when everyone should have their minds on business. You’d think that they would with the stakes this high right?
The main guy who likes her is Bruce. So he’s from the army and is the one in charge of protecting the scientists. This sometimes means making some hard calls like when he has to murder someone who was in the way. Phyllis gets mad at this but I was 100% on the soldier’s side. She was right there and yet she acts like there was another way. It’s clear that this guy had lost his marbles and he even threatened to shoot the heroes. So Bruce took him out first and saved all of their lives. I don’t get how you can possibly discount that. It’s what happened after all and it’s not like Bruce enjoyed his mission there.
Bruce also takes a whole lot of risks later on as he keeps testing out the weapons on the aliens which results in his having to go out onto the battlefield alone. He’s nearly choked to death on one occasion and barely escapes with his life the other times. So he’s a good guy that doesn’t hold back on his missions. He accomplished his mission and yes there was a body count but it was as a last resort. He was surprisingly weak in a fist fight when one of the other guys went crazy later on though. I expected him to be a lot stronger as a soldier so he really needs to his the gym at some point.
As a final note, the aliens in these invasion films really aren’t very smart sometimes. There’s no reason to even bother giving Earth demands when there’s no chance that they could be met. Instead, use the element of disguise and deal some damage quickly. Wirth all of the aliens being invisible they could launch the ultimate first strike and blow up so many installation all at once that humanity won’t know what do . Plus if they were smart about it, people wouldn’t even be able to guess that it was aliens so they could use these tactics for an extremely long time. Humanity only stands a chance because of plot armor.
Overall, The Invisible Invaders is a good movie. I think it could have stood to be a little more exciting though. Most of the film is about the characters talking things over and trying to find a weakness. The actual confrontations are pretty rare and considering that the aliens are fully sentient, we could have had more hype dialogue with them. Maybe see more of the other governments as well and what they are doing to counter the alien threat. We see that for the most part everyone is getting wrecked but couldn’t some others adjust? These aliens are basically just guys with guns without the invisibility working so if you monitor the entrances and exits you can see when someone shows up and pop them. Well I suppose that’s for more of a thriller film. Either way I would recommend the movie. It’s a quality feature with good writing and pacing so you can’t go wrong there.
Overall 6/10