by Bryan & Heather
Ever since our book club on Alan Taylor’s Civil War of 1812, Bryan has been casually on the lookout for more quality material covering this most overlooked of major American conflicts. One place we did not expect to find it, however, was scrolling Prime Video—yet there it was, a supposedly Prime-time Emmy Nominated full length documentary entitled The First Invasion. A promising start, but we all know how even the best documentaries can sometimes stumble when it comes to adapting historical narrative on screen, both in content and in representation. With cautious optimism, we hit play.
The First Invasion started off surprisingly strong, with a detailed overview of the complex causes of the War of 1812, and how the contradictory relationship of those flashpoints to diplomacy and the delay in communications led to a war that may not have needed to be fought at all by the time hostilities commenced. Bryan was very pleased to see the mention of British support for Native American resistance in the West discussed alongside the impressment of American sailors, and the latter was accurately portrayed as the British not recognizing the right of their own citizens to renounce allegiance, rather than just kidnapping natural-born Americans. So far, so good.
As we moved into the actual campaigns of the war, however, things began to get…not bad, per se, but more like what we expected from a 20-year-old documentary. While the events of the early war were more or less related accurately, the producers seemed allergic to providing wider context, like in the case of talking heads mocking the idea of invading Canada rather than examining the long history of US designs on our northern neighbor, and even skipping past fascinating little tidbits (like how the American Navy was much smaller than Britain’s but its frigates were much better built, which is what led to some early victories on the high seas against long odds) in favor of rushing to what they were really here to talk about: the well-known trinity of the Burning of Washington, the bombardment of Fort McHenry, and Andrew Jackson’s victory at New Orleans—arguably the United States’ highest and lowest points of the war.. While each of these are related in admirable detail, any other contemporary events are pushed aside, and no mention is made of campaigns along the Great Lakes, upstate New York, or even Jackson’s first command fighting the Muscogee immediately before taking command at New Orleans. We also theorized that most of the reenactments featured in the documentary were sampled from other projects, as there didn’t seem to be much consistency between them. Whatever their source, the budget for recreated battle sequences was not apparently all that high either, and they suffered from the perennial problem of pitched battles really being on the scale of minor skirmishes with only a couple dozen reenactors (and, hilariously, an audibly recognizable black man reading lines as Andrew Jackson).
So, in the final accounting, did The First Invasion live up to the promise of that Emmy nomination? By the standards of 2024, almost certainly not. That is not to say it wasn’t worth watching, however. One could do far worse for an introduction to its topic, especially if you’ve become inured to the kinds of productions often seen in park visitor centers that take themselves a little too seriously for their production value. When a non-satirical film delivers the line “what history remembers as the Forgotten War,” you know that you’re not watching prestige television, but it will still hold its own kind of amusement.