Invasion (2024)
Sometimes a film baffles you in ways you genuinely weren't expecting. I went into Bobby Boermans' Dutch action thriller Invasion (or Invasie, as it's known in its home country) completely blind and with an open mind, and I came out the other side scratching my head. Not in a good way.
The setup: a neighbouring country called Veragua launches a sudden, massive, unprovoked military attack on the small Caribbean islands of Curaçao and Aruba, catching the Dutch government entirely flat-footed. From there, we follow three young Navy recruits, including Joes Brauers, as they scramble to work out what the right thing to do actually is. On paper, that sounds like it could be a perfectly serviceable war thriller. In practice, the premise collapses almost immediately under the weight of its own absurdity. The idea that some fictional nation would roll up with a fleet of warships to invade two tiny islands for practically no discernible reason is so ludicrous it shatters your suspension of disbelief before the opening credits have finished rolling. It's a premise that demands you meet it halfway, and I tried, genuinely. But the script just never gives you a handhold.
If the story was the first major hurdle, the audio was the nail in the coffin. I watched the English-dubbed version, and it's immediately clear that whoever handled the dubbing was not doing their best work. Some of the dialogue is practically inaudible, while the background soundtrack is cranked up so loud it bulldozes over everything else. The dubbed voices feel completely detached from the people speaking them on screen, and the result is that every performance comes across as wooden and hollow. To be fair to the cast, I don't think the native Dutch audio track would have transformed things entirely, because the performances do look stiff even without the dubbing factored in. But the post-production audio mix is a proper mess, and it makes an already shaky film almost unwatchable at points.
There are things I can give credit for. The tropical locations are captured nicely, and the cinematography does at least make Curaçao and Aruba look genuinely beautiful. When the film decides to show off its explosions and special effects, they're serviceable enough, not embarrassing. But that's a pretty thin list of positives to hold up against everything else going wrong. No amount of pretty island shots can compensate for a narrative this flimsy. I've seen war films made on shoestring budgets that managed to construct a believable sense of conflict and stakes. Invasion, despite apparently having the resources to stage some fairly large-scale sequences, never gets close to that. It actually made me think of Megdan: Between Water and Fire, another recent war-adjacent film I watched, though that one at least had a weight and authenticity to its storytelling that Invasion never comes close to matching.
The deeper problem is that the film never works out what it wants to be. Is it a survival thriller? A moral drama about duty and conscience? A straightforward action film? It keeps gesturing at all three without committing to any of them, leaving you with a disjointed, chaotic experience that drifts from scene to scene without any real urgency or emotional anchor. The young recruits at the centre of the story are given so little to work with, either by the script or by a coherent sense of character, that it's hard to invest in their choices or their fates.
One and a half stars. Invasion is a baffling misfire that I really can't recommend to anyone. It has a couple of decent moments buried in there, but they're not worth excavating through everything surrounding them. Give it a wide berth.
Rating: ★½ | Year: 2024 | Watched: 2026-06-12
Where to watch
Watch in the UK
Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi
Watch in the US
Stream: Amazon Prime Video · Amazon Prime Video with Ads
Rent: Amazon Video · Apple TV Store · Google Play Movies · YouTube
Buy: Amazon Video · Apple TV Store · Google Play Movies · YouTube
Physical: Amazon US
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