The Inhumans S01E01-02 Review: Rotten Tomatoes

Marvel's the Inhumans, Season 1, Episode 1: Behold the Inhumans; Episode 2: Those Who Would Destroy Us

Marvel's Inhumans has had a pretty troubled journey. From the debut of the Inhuman race in their first TV show, Agents of SHIELD, the producers of that show aren't allowed to use any of the actual Inhuman characters or the moon-city of Atillan, because they're going to be important for an Inhumans movie down the line. So Agents of SHIELD had this weird thing going on where they had to tell an Inhuman story over the course of multiple seasons, but have to make up their own Inhumans as they go. Obviously that's because the real Inhumans movie is going to be super-spectacular, right? It turns out... no, not really. Marvel has been flip-flopping on whether the Inhumans are going to be a movie or a TV show like several times and the end result is both (a TV show whose first two episodes are shown in IMAX cinemas) and that sounds like a pretty momentous occasion... except it's a bit of a dud. Well, not a bit of a dud. It's fucking bad is what it is. 

Marvel Studios hasn't really produced anything that's flat-out bad other than maybe Iron Fist. Even messes like Age of Ultron or some parts of Agents of SHIELD always carried them either great action scenes or neat comedic beats. But the first two episodes of Inhumans carried neither. 

The concept of the Inhumans is that they are a secret society of super-powered beings descended from alien experimentation that live on a secret city in a moon, with a royal family and everything. Considering everything in superhero comic books, the premise is weird but weird premises and wacky characters can make for good stories nonetheless. Just look at Guardians of the Galaxy and X-Men for other Marvel groups of wacky characters that ended up being amazing. So, no, it's not the premise that makes the premiere of Marvel's Inhumans kinda bad, it's the execution.

Now I'm going to be charitable and try and judge Inhumans as its own thing. Judging it as being an installment in the Marvel Cinematic Universe is going to be too hard. Nevermind that the Inhumans have actually been featured before in Agents of SHIELD and is subsequently ignored beyond a handwave-y "oh, those other impure dudes our ancestors left on earth?" Nevermind that no one seems to care that they live in a world where superheroes show up every other month (the Netflix shows, despite being far more down-to-earth, are great at showing civilians acknowledging they live in a superhero world). 

But the Inhumans is just filled with poor pacing and absolutely crummy dialogue, and all the characters feel like cardboard cutouts with not much of a personality. We go from a generic government-chase-powered-people prologue as one of the agents of the Inhumans, Triton, is seemingly killed, and then we just go breakneck and introduce all the main characters -- Black Bolt, Medusa, Maximus the Mad, Gorgon, Karnak, Crystal and Lockjaw. And, Lockjaw aside (being a big CGI adorable dog and easily the best part of the two episodes) everyone doesn't look good at all. Apparently it's even worse in the IMAX version where some of the CGI is unfinished, but considering how much better even the early seasons of Agents of SHIELD looks... yeah. Medusa's cheap-looking purple dress and her horrifyingly bad CGI hair is the biggest offender here, but a lot of the other guys don't look like superheroes or an alien culture, they just look like they shop at a particularly weird hipster clothes shop. Like, I watched some old low-budget sci-fi shows in my time. I played through some N64 games. Bad graphics doesn't essentially kill a piece of fiction, if it delivers in every other aspect. But here? The minimal-effort costumes is just another symptom of a pretty dire show.

And they just move from scene to scene pretty lifelessly. Oh, here's a ceremony of the terrigenesis. Oh, here's the slums. Oh, here is Maximus being shifty. Oh, here is Maximus telling Medusa outright that he loves her like a lovesick puppy. Oh, here is Maximus pulling a coup. Oh, here is Lockjaw depositing the royal family on different parts of Hawaii for no real reason. There's a significant lack of wit or logic to it all, no subtlety at all, and it's particularly frustrating because I know that the actors involved are pretty talented. Game of Thrones's Iwan Rheon and Lost's Ken Leung, playing Maximus and Karnak respectively, are given so little material to work with, saddled with paper-thin characters acting out crappy scenes. The two of them, as well as the lady who plays Crystal, are the only decent actors in the whole thing, and even then they're not quite enough to save the show.

Like, I'm going to try to get through the main characters and plotlines, but there's just so few to unpack. The setup of Atillan is pretty shit, we're just told that, hey, there's this city on the moon! Filled with powered people! And they have a very shitty racist attitude and segregate those who don't get powers into basically slave labour! The king's brother, Maximus, a powerless Inhuman himself, makes no real attempts to hide how this is bullshit and basically wants to move the Inhuman population to Earth, but no one gives a shit about him. He stages a takeover, is creepily obsessed romantically with his brother's wife, and is creepy to his sister-in-law who he takes hostage. Being played by Iwan Rheon makes him creepy enough at times, but it's really not enough to make him interesting. They really could've made the society and kingship stuff be intriguing, but when compared to Thor, it's just so devoid of any nuance to it. There's a random prophetic Inhuman kid that Maximus befriends, he kills some of the high council... and it's very bland all the while he's doing it.

Our supposed protagonists, with the exception of the gigantic adorable teleporting dog Lockjaw, are all even less interesting. There's Black Bolt, our supposed main character, who's supposed to be mute because a single whisper from him can shatter cities and shit, but all this ends up doing is make him look super-constipated. And considering how much Thor (again) and Wonder Woman milked the 'fish-out-of-water' trope for funsies, Black Bolt's time in human society just makes him look like a total moron, with absolutely bad-looking acting that makes him look either bored or a dumbass. 

Medusa... gets shaved. She's Black Bolt's love interest. Maximus also wants to bang her. There's some weird backstory where Black Bolt's parents killed her parents or some shit? She's a bit screechy and doesn't really have much to her. And her costume looks cheap. And because the animators apparently don't want to animate her hair, after some blah hair-whip scenes, Maximus's people shaves her head bald, which... kinda makes sense, but it makes her kind of look silly and loses her iconic look from the comics. Her declaration of love to Black Bolt and vowing to find him should probably be a huge touching moment, but the scene's just bad.

Her sister Crystal's costume is a bit better, but she, too, doesn't have much to her. Maximus confronts her with how she really should side with him, since she should understand the injustices the royal family commits, but it's just a series of "join me" "no!" "okay then" scenes that's just so dry. But at least Crystal's decent, not flat-out bad like Medusa or Gorgon. 

The other members, Karnak and Gorgon, are respectively 'snarky dude' and 'rawr me smash dude' respectively. Gorgon stomps the ground and hangs out with surfers, and delivers some cringe-worthy moments. Karnak can like calculate the fighting moves or some shit, I dunno. Leung's Karnak at least manages to offer some genuinely funny lines.

There's Lockjaw, too, who's cute but doesn't do much. There's Auran, Maximus's main enforcer, who suffices well as a scary fighter lady. There's a dude that's literally a speaking door. There's also Triton, who does jack-all but get blown up.

The thing is... we don't actually know any of these characters. Throughout two episodes of the Inhumans, some 70+ minutes, we don't really know these guys as characters. There are some historical backstory thrown around, some very poorly-presented monologues and some bad dialogue, but really, I struggle to think of anything to say about Black Bolt beyond "mute dude", or Medusa beyond "hair lady". Honestly, even with its spotty quality and making up random dudes for their version of Inhumans, I'd watch a show with Agents of SHIELD's Inhumans any day. It's like they took Thor's whole 'jealous little brother prince takes over the crown' plot, slapped it to a generic X-Men plot, and sucked out all the joy out of it.

That's not to mention all the horrid editing and nonsensical plotlines. Why did Lockjaw bring everyone to different places? Why did the police officers allow Black Bolt to listen to Medusa yammer on his weird alien phone for like ten minutes? Why did Crystal send everyone to Earth even though the whole point of the Royal Family's decree is to not go to Earth? Why would you give your king, who can't talk, a phone that doesn't have a texting function built into it?

Also, why are we rooting for Black Bolt's royal family, anyway? They enforce a rule that segregates anyone who doesn't show an impressive power to slave labour, and even the supposedly innocent-and-likable-young-girl Crystal goes all "you're a human, ewww" and Karnak and Gorgon all make fun of how Maximus isn't a real Inhuman. Hell, Maximus himself admits that only his status as the king's brother makes him exempt from being a slave. Honestly, if the show didn't make Maximus so murder-happy (for no real reason) I'm high-pressed to root against him.

It's honestly pretty disastrous, the costumes look like barely-serviceable cosplay and the dialogue look like they're made for a particularly stilted 80's cartoon. It's very easily worse than Iron Fist, a show I already dislike (and with Finn Jones's far superior performance in Defenders, it's clear that it's not the actor's problem but the writers and filmmaker) and easily the weakest part of the MCU by a huge, huge margin. Apparently the guy directing Inhumans is the same guy that directed Iron Fist, which... why? Just why? Marvel kind of wants to use the Inhumans as a counter to X-Men, who they don't have the film rights to, but honestly Inhumans is so, so bad in writing, pacing, dialogue, action and visuals that I genuinely find it hard to really find anything positive about this.