{alltv} Familiar 'Falling Skies' stays interesting

Independence Day is coming a few weeks early — or a few years late.

No matter how you look at it, you can't look at Steven Spielberg's new alien-invasion adventure, Falling Skies, and not see the bare bones of the 1996 hit Independence Day, plus shades of Spielberg's own War of the Worlds (a mediocrity on which Skies actually improves) along with every outgunned rebellion film from Red Dawn to Drums Along the Mohawk.

Though overfamiliarity stops Falling from being as exciting a debut as it might have been, it doesn't breed contempt. And much of the credit goes to a cleverly twisted central idea and to a strong central performance from Noah Wyle as the everyman hero.

The idea is laid out early by Wyle's Tom Mason, a military-history professor forced to put his academic notions into action when Earth is overrun by space invaders. When asked how mankind can possibly triumph, he points to our own revolutionaries, who defeated a vastly superior British force by "making enough trouble" to make a continued occupation inconvenient.

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That sets up a plausible argument for how the good guys might win, something many shows never offer. But Falling also offers a counter analogy: What if, instead of us being the colonists defeating the Brits, we're the Indians about to be overwhelmed by the colonists? And in those contrasting analogies, Falling plants both hope and suspense.

The show skips the invasion itself, picking up a few months after. Humans are on the run, organized around the surviving military structure and watching helplessly as multi-legged alien "Skitters" turn their captured children into scavenger slave labor.

To their credit, the writers do know your first thought might be why would a civilization with such advanced technology turn kids into slaves "just to collect old toasters and copper wire"? You have to assume the writers wouldn't pose a question they didn't intend to answer, but you'll also have to wait for the answer.

While you wait, enjoy Wyle's adroit transformation into a thinking-man's hero, a smart widower with three sons who is fighting, not because he wants to, but because he must. Wyle creates a welcome sense of empathy and plants a real person in the midst of the not-always-convincing aliens and sometimes cardboard humans around him.

As is often the nature of such programs, Skies does ask you to accept a lot of clunky dialogue and a few too many easily spotted twists. Even so, fans of the genre can embrace it as a summer-viewing diversion — one that's likely to work even better for younger viewers, who haven't seen all the films from which it borrows.

For them, Sunday's like the Fourth of July.

Falling Skies
TNT, Sunday, 9 p.m. ET/PT
* * * out of four