The Bad: The Script/dialogue
**Story: 6**
**Dialogue/Writing: 5**

None of the intentional corniness or self awareness of _Starship Troopers_, but all of the edge and cringe. (I just started _Traitors of Mars_, and I take that back. _Invasion_ is, next to its sequel, actually fairly charming, with extremely likeable if terribly clichéd cornball military fiction characters compared to the mountain of awful Japanese shounen character and mocap cringe that is just the first five minutes of _TOM_.) Still, everyone in this is dumb (okay, perhaps realistic given they're the military's meat shields), except for the genius, who is an asshole. And maybe kind of ~evil~? Of course.

It's Shinji Aramaki, but don't expect _GitS:SAC_ (**The Original, TYVM**). It's more like the 3D CG reboot, or what I could bear to watch of it.

The script is serviceable, along with the fan service, for the first two acts, but it starts to both jump the shark and get nonsensical in the end. Holy space tech and varied room design, though; the production design and Rico's one-man-army routine are hella nice to watch. Sniper Tifa (it took me a while to realize who the English VA sounded like) was probably the most likable and sympathetic character, though, even with her cliché samurai anime/Soul Calibur rural villager backstory.

The—IMO—_Very_ Good
**Aesthetics/Production Design: 9**
**Animation: 5**

And _Invasion_ does excel at the post-_The Spirits Within_ "3D CG Japanese military technicool space marine" aesthetic. The space marine armor of what I dubbed the "booty battle armor brigade" is a 50/50 mix of the Deep Eyes squad armor design from _TSW_ crossed with Halo's Spartan 2s' armor. And the female under armor and command/pilot uniform were clearly the work of KOEI, as it looks almost just like Hayabusa's (and Kasumi's) rubber ninja armor from Ninja Gaiden and DOA5—which are lickably svelte and rubbery-looking.

The production design and cinematic color grading/postprocessing are top notch, if low budget (even on Bravia Core it's only HD—and no HDR—), and it shows, with fairly frequent aliasing on the sharp angled straight edges that require the kind of rendering time that only theater release CG gets. Still, it's got more (artistic) character and tonal detail than every Marvel film spaceshipalientechmagicwakandaironmanbluelightredlight put together. I love this shit, and I want a fucking Japanese bug-shooting space commando game with this kind of production design and look. The animation (which is the name for the actual, you know, ANIMATION, is actually pretty terrible for most non-suited actions. The character models and textures are several notches above, but we still have a ways to go to making more convincing people in these productions. It's still very close to _Spirits Within_, only with higher res textures and much poorer outsourced budget animation work and bad mocap, just like the Resident Evil animated films/series.

The closest games I can think of to this are Dino Crisis 3, (which was apparently pretty nuts, and mediocre, though I never played it, and probably never will thanks to Xbox emulation being nonfunctional,) **Binary Domain**, which is unique and fun, but cringy in the same ways as this film and its sequel, and **Vanquish**, which is supposedly fun, but only Dino Crisis 3 actually has what I'd call a similar production design and tonal aesthetic, with its rounded battle armor, and the creature killing.