Inhumans is bad from top to bottom. Try as it might, the show does not live up to the Marvel brand. It is most definitely not worth seeing in IMAX, and I wouldn’t recommend catching it on TV either.
Even better:
And on top of all that, even though the IMAX version is supposed to be presented as a movie, it still includes episode recap flashbacks halfway through, making me wonder if the editor didn’t get the memo.
I find the Inhumans, dating way back to their inception in the comics, utterly tedious, and their royal politicking agonizingly overwrought. The powers are largely dumb too. Marvel backed the wrong horse trying to shoehorn in a mutant replacement.
Generally, I agree. There’s potential for good execution, but the “royal intrigue” stuff in the comics always bored me to tears. I like individual characters sprinkled into other stories or in standalone runs, though – Black Bolt is cool as a part of Illuminati stories, and the most recent Karnak run is good, but that’s about it.
As for the show, it cannot earn the gravitas that it keeps trying to go for. Every time it tries, it undermines itself immediately by doing something goofy.
Yep, that sucked. My expectations going in were rock-bottom and that’s what we got. It feels like they tried to start with the big climax of some kind of epic story, instead of doing the background first. If this was a season finale after a few months of getting to know these characters, or if they’d scattered everyone and revealed the coup stuff gradually as a big mystery, then maybe it would have worked. Add some fairly terrible acting and absolutely no sense of pacing, and you have a terrible couple of hours.
My bias says there’s no way it could be as disappointing as Iron Fist, because Iron Fist had both a higher pedigree coming from Netflix, and because in recent comic history, there have been excellent Iron Fist stories that you could bring fairly faithfully to the MCU without being any more jarring than Doctor Strange, while the Inhumans are a much harder sell and no one clamoring for their tale to be told.
But it does sound like it may be objectively worse than Iron Fist. I sure won’t watch to find out.
I want to detail some of the terrible things about this show, but every time I think of an example, it reminds me of something else terrible, and I get distracted.
Attilan sucks. It looks like Earth. You’d think that thousands of years of amazing alien powers and technology would result in architecture that looked like something other than massive stone buildings. There’s an apartment building furnished with decorative branches, square bowls, and a stainless steel sink and faucet. I laughed out loud when Maximus pulled out the same clippers my barber uses.
I’m going to watch the whole thing because I’m already a quarter through it, and I assume it’s going to tie back in to Agents of SHIELD at some point. I’m just going to enjoy the badness, or maybe try to find a single thing I like about each episode.
I see no reason to believe the tie in won’t be anything more than Daisy quipping “man the moon sure is crazy huh” in one episode one time, because AoS, the movies, and the Netflix-verse have become more or less fully independent at this point and it blows.
I mean, I know that, like, in my bones, but I can still hope for a Coulson cameo, or that the final shot of Inhumans turns into the opening shot of AoS the following week, or something cool.
In the meantime, I can have at least a little bit of fun by answering the question “Just how bad is it?” for the next several weeks.
