Secret Invasion director brushes off mixed reviews
Is it Secret Invasion's job to fulfill fan expectations? Executive producer Ali Selim doesn't think so
Aux News Secret Invasion
The Disney+ Marvel television show strategy is an exercise in diminishing returns. Even big boss Bob Iger thinks the influx of series has “diluted focus and attention” from the brands. Nevertheless, the show(s) must go on, and the people who make them must live with the consequences. So it is for Secret Invasion director and executive producer Ali Selim, one of the only people who can actually talk about it amid a dual writer-actor strike.
Selim has a pretty normal reaction to getting bad press in general: “Oh, I don’t read reviews. With all due respect,” he tells Variety. “For me, I view all the storytelling work I do as a dialogue with an audience. When the show is finished and put up on the screen, that’s my half of the dialogue. And the audience then starts their half of the response to it. I think that’s valuable, but I don’t know.”
But for the Marvel Cinematic Universe in particular? “[Projects] resonate with different people at different times for different reasons, and Marvel has a very devoted—even rabid—fan base who have expectations and when their expectations aren’t fulfilled, they move in the other direction; they give it a thumbs down,” Selim opines. “I don’t know—is it our job to fulfill their expectations? Or to tell the story that we’re telling? So, it’s a tricky thing.”
The balance between serving the fans and serving the story can no doubt be tricky, but it’s certainly doable. Take WandaVision, for example: no one could argue that fans’ expectations were fulfilled on that project because surely no fans expected the exact sort of genre-bending sci-fi exploration of grief that WandaVision was. Yet that show managed to delight avid MCU fans and television critics alike.
As Selim notes in his interview, not every project can be a winner, but Secret Invasion marks a new low for the MCU. According to Rotten Tomatoes, it’s the lowest-rated entry in the Marvel canon ever (via NME). It’s probably time for a course correction (especially if Bob Iger is calling the studio out), but that’s a job for someone who is not Ali Selim. He’s content enough with what he accomplished with Secret Invasion. “[There’s] a big fight in Episode 6, but there’s also this incredibly vulnerable conversation between a broken Gravik and a really broken Fury, who we ultimately learn is G’iah. But when you’re watching it, you are watching two men say ‘I’m sorry,’ which is kind of groundbreaking in a way,” he contends in another interview with Deadline. “I mean, would you ever see Biden and Putin in a room saying, ‘I’m sorry?’ I don’t think so.”
Perhaps not everyone picked up on just how groundbreaking this series was? In any case, “I would love it if everybody loved it, but I also don’t have that expectation myself,” Selim says to Variety, “so I feel great about the response to it.”
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And by dialogue with the audience, he means monologue at the audience presumably?
“Oh, I don’t read reviews. With all due respect,” he tells Variety. “For me, I view all the storytelling work I do as a dialogue with an audience. When the show is finished and put up on the screen, that’s my half of the dialogue. And the audience then starts their half of the response to it.“And then I don’t listen to their half.” – Selim, apparently
Dialogue implies back-and-forth between the speakers. This is literally the opposite of that. The entire season is written and produced before the general public gets to speak.(Under an actual dialogue, Maria Hill would have been revealed to have a LMD before the season ended….which by itself would have been a substantial improvement to the product.)
It’s almost as if it were an insipid, meaningless thing to say!
To me, that’s no different than a movie. You write it, shoot it, edit it, and then you present it. Nothing the audience says can change it; it’s done with. But the audience’s feedback is still valuable. It helps you grow as a person by teaching you what worked and what didn’t, and that can inform your future work. It can still be a dialogue… but you have to listen to what the audience says. Otherwise, you’re basically shouting into the wind.
Well, you have to be careful of that, too. There can be value in listening to feedback, but I’m not a huge proponent of artists and creators feeling beholden to the audience; particularly in this era. Listening to too much angry audience internet wank is how we end up with fanfics like Rise of Skywalker.
Sure, but my point isn’t that creators should be beholden to audiences (which I feel like is closer to what Hank_Dolworth was saying when they suggested Selim should’ve reversed Maria Hill’s death) or even that they should listen to audiences. It was that it’s possible to have a dialogue with an audience about a finished work. J.J. Abrams strikes me as someone who has spent his career ignoring valid criticisms of his directing work. It does not surprise me in the least that when it came time to direct Episode 9, he chose to listen to the worst criticisms of what was technically someone else’s work.
I sure wouldn’t. Reviewers can feel free to create their own thing if they don’t like what I made.
Damn you’re fucking cool.
That’s fine, but then that’s not a dialogue.
I read that part through so many times in astonishment. I mean, if we take his comments at face value, he seems like a nightmarish person to have a discussion with.
“Mixed reviews” is being very, very nice to this shitshow.
Fan expectations were that the show be good and well … who wants to tell him?
I didn’t hate it, but after finishing the whole series, it certainly felt very anticlimactic. The only takeaways, to me, seemed to be that there were way more Skrulls on Earth than previously understood (which they made little of thus far), and there are one or two Super-Skrulls now. (Which was barely explained, to the casual fans who won’t get the reference.)
I know Covid-19 forced changes but WandaVision did not stick the landing and Docto Strange 2 compounded the disaster.“They’ll never know what you sacrificed for them.” – the people of Westview had just been begging for death after your torturing them so they’re not going to see it that way or care.Then Strange said “I’m not here to talk about Westview. You made it right and that’s all that matters.” How??? Wanda just fucked off after being called out on her bullshit, how is that making it right?Agents of SHIELD was better than all of this – all the TV and just about all of the movies (and such a better show than it haf any right to be) and deserved better than getting shunted off into a memory hole like it did. Just compare its LMD arc about duplicates of the main cast compared to whatever this was for starters.PS::Justice for Ralph!
I’m glad I checked out after End Game and feel completely vindicated for doing so.
We’re glad too.
The two Spider-Man films (Far from Home and No Way Home) are good codas to Endgame and No Way Home is a good coda for not just the MCU but other cinematic universes that precedee it too. Everything else has been a wash, though. Stopping at Endgame is also a perfectly fine place to stop as well.
I’d say Guardians 3 is worth watching to wrap up that arc as well.
Guardians 3 was way better than it had any right to be, and I’m glad that after a slightly underwhelming opening weekend box office, it hung in there and did solid business throughout the rest of its run. It was a rare win for post-Endgame Marvel
Might give it a shot, but do you mean “good” as in they’re good movies in their own right, or “good” as in “only watch this for closure”? I’ve noticed a lot of even hardcore fan getting sick of the rest of it, and I’m wondering how the MCU will end – whimper or bang?
I didn’t… but I find myself watching less and less. Still haven’t seen Wakanda Forever. Dropped out of Moon Knight. Enjoyed AntMan3 in the theatre, no desire to revisit it. Might watch Multiverse of Madness again but skip the first 45 minutes or so. I really just want to watch the full Raimi third act. Guardians 3 was amazing, loved it. Loved it! It’s also another “endpoint” essentially lol.I’m not one to make a “i’m DONE” statement (not saying you are); but naturally I’m just shrugging going to see a lot of these flicks. I liked Love & Thunder in the theatre a lot, I don’t think it deserves the level of hate, but… I also have zero desire to go back. The only D+ shows I would rewatch are WV, Loki, and Hawkeye (watched it at christmas yay).Rewatchability isn’t strictly the metric of quality but I’ve gone back to most Marvel movies multiple times because they were great to watch. I don’t even really want to watch No Way Home again. I liked it but meh. Spiderverse is so much better. GOTG3 ruled and I will absolutely watch that one again. But I can’t say I’m excited about anything on the slate.
“[There’s] a big fight in Episode 6, but there’s also this incredibly
vulnerable conversation between a broken Gravik and a really broken
Fury, who we ultimately learn is G’iah. But when you’re watching it, you
are watching two men say ‘I’m sorry,’ which is kind of groundbreaking
in a way,” he contends in another interview with Deadline. “I mean, would you ever see Biden and Putin in a room saying, ‘I’m sorry?’ I don’t think so.”
Ah, ok. It makes sense now. He has no idea what he’s talking about
“He’s content enough with what he accomplished with Secret Invasion”
“Accomplished” is doing a lot of heavy lifting there.
“[There’s] a big fight in Episode 6, but there’s also this incredibly vulnerable conversation between a broken Gravik and a really broken Fury, who we ultimately learn is G’iah. But when you’re watching it, you are watching two men say ‘I’m sorry,’ which is kind of groundbreaking in a way,” Whaaaat? As he himself notes, that wasn’t “a really broken Fury,” and it not being Fury makes any emotion in the scene false. It was silly that G’iah was so convincingly acting and talking like Fury and sharing Fury’s regrets. Shit, it would’ve made more sense, and had more emotion heft, if Fury allowed himself to be put in one of those memory pods connected to G’iah and she just used her skrull ability to imitate him. At least then you could say she was feeding off of Fury’s real memories and emotions. Something this article doesn’t mention from the directors interviews is that he also says Rhodey has been a skrull since Civil fucking War. In one interview he says he “thinks” that the case, but in another he answers definitively. Which doesn’t even make sense in the scope of the show, as it’s mentioned that the rebellion didn’t even start until the blip. It makes less sense as we see in Endgame that Rhodey bleeds red blood and still can’t walk without his exoskeleton. If confirmed in future shows/movies that also retroactively robs Rhodey of the some the characters best emotional scenes. I could buy a post-Endgame switch out, since the Avengers are basically gone, making the skrulls being able to kidnap him without anyone noticing somewhat plausible. And who the fuck knows when Ross was supposed to be replaced?Secret Invasion was awful in the comics for much the same reasons. There were arguments amongst the writers and head editors as to which characters could have been skrulls and for long they could’ve been skrulls. It retroactively invalidates whole comic runs of characters whose writers obviously weren’t writing them as skrull replacements. The concept was bad in the comics and it didn’t get much better when put to film.
Secret Invasion was awful in the comics for much the same reasons.
Too right – this was one of Marvel’s worst ungainly crossovers of its era, and Marvel did a ton of really bad ungainly crossovers. I was hoping that they’d be able to pull some kind of good story out of the mess from the comics, but they did not.
Rhodey being a Skrull “since Civil War” is just for shock value without consideration of what it means or WHY. I have zero faith that Armor Wars is going to do anything outstanding with that conceit, so all it does is rob the MCU of a disabled hero and remove actual Rhodey from a lot of great moments. His friendship with Nebula developed during the blip. Being involved in some major battles. Being at Tony’s funeral. Oh, that was all fake? That was all pretend? Cool. Cool cool cool cool cool.What exactly was Skrull Rhodey doing then for… 8 years MCU time? 9?
I’ve been disappointed by MCU shows before, but none have made me as outright furious as this.
https://mattthecatania.wordpress.com/2023/07/26/secret-invasion-revealed-to-suck
I know it’s months after the fact and this’ll probably get lost in the shuffle, but this is a fantastic review. It’s clear that you actively watched the show and found plenty of incisive and witty things to say about it, which is more than can be said for most of the coverage I’ve seen.
Thank you very much for your kind review of my unkind review.
Thank you for writing it, I thoroughly enjoyed it ^_^
I didn’t actually hate the show myself (it’s not great, but it’s no Inhumans), but I still agree with everything you wrote. At least the cast were fun to watch.
Snitches wear stitches?
Is it their job to fulfill the expectations of the audience? I would think some of them, yes, unless those expectations are utterly impossible. I think the only hope the audience had for this show was that it would be quite good. But it’s not.
“Or to tell the story that we’re telling?” he’s “content with what he accomplished.”What story was that? What was accomplished?I enjoyed episode 1 and 2, I liked the vibe and mood… but… it was a decent show that seemed like it never really went anywhere and was terrible. In the end, killing off Maria Hill proved to be exactly fridging. Meant to give the male hero motivation he doesn’t really need and lazily removing a character. Hill’s death is basically pointless and is much more frustrating for being an ignominous end. Then they repeat it two episodes later but FAKE OUT. Then they kill Talos. None of it seems to matter. Im sure it was a budget thing but the Skrulls basically remaining in the same identifiable forms the entire show is a stupid choice. Why did this show feel so small and tiny? Fury has a Skrull wife. Sure, okay… *shrug*I’m honestly super easy on this stuff. This show turned actively bad in a way that floored me. I don’t think any previous D+ marvel show has ever been *bad*. Mixed? Sure. None of them have really hit on full.