Article first published as TV Review: INHUMANS on Seat42F.
INHUMANS premieres tonight at 8 on ABC.
MARVEL’s newest show, premiering tonight
on ABC, is INHUMANS. The eight-episode miniseries presents the first
two installments this evening. The show finds the Royal Family of the
Inhuman moon settlement the victims of a coup. Fleeing, they must find
one another again, then figure out how to wrest control of their home
and their people back from the traitorous relation that took it over.
If you’re a fan of Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., which also airs on ABC, you are already familiar with what Inhumans
are – people that have some alien DNA mixed into their genetics, which
gives them power when exposed to Terrigen Mist. The compound was
released across the planet in S.H.I.E.L.D., and now there are Inhumans
everywhere.
INHUMANS is not about those Inhumans,
though. The city of Attilan, where the story begins, is actually above
the Earth, on the moon, hidden for many years. (The show doesn’t say how
long they’ve lived there.) These Inhumans go through a gentler process
of transformation than their counterparts on Earth, as they’ve been
doing for generations, and the Mist isn’t harmful to those even who
don’t have latent powers. Instead, the Inhumans without abilities form a
lower caste to support the hierarchy of the city.
It is convenient to make these Inhumans
distinctly different. For one thing, it allows INHUMANS to use the
familiar characters made famous in the Marvel comic books, which were
never mentioned on S.H.I.E.L.D., so could not realistically exist on the
planet in the form we’re used to seeing them. Instead, we get to see a
fully-formed society headed by Black Bolt (Anson Mount, Hell On Wheels),
Medusa (Serinda Swan, Graceland), and the rest without interferences
from other Marvel properties.
Unfortunately, INHUMANS begs to be tied
in. It’s such a sweeping, important, powerful group, that one really
wonders why they haven’t been involved yet. Yes, I buy their isolation.
Yet, at the same time, it feels like they should have made some efforts
to contact the Earth Inhumans before Triton’s (Mike Moh, Empire)
tentative attempts in the pilot.
Mount is a terrific Black Bolt, even
with the sign language added in, which feels unnecessary and trite for
the character, he conveys the power of the man that doesn’t dare speak
for fear of destroying everything. Iwan Rheon (Game of Thrones) also
makes a stupendous Maximus, the conflicted brother of Black Bolt who
feels he must rule the people to save them. Maximus doesn’t see himself
as evil, and Rheon captures that nuance. I also like Isabelle Cornish
(Puberty Blues) as Crystal and the way the show has CGI-ed giant dog
Lockjaw.
But the rest of the production just
feels relatively thin I don’t see Swan as Medusa, and Ken Leung (Lost)
feels a bit, well, lost as Karnak, while Eme Ikwuakor (Extant) is
one-note as Gorgon. Lockjaw’s efforts to save the royals feels weird and
inefficient. A plot that leaves most of the characters stranded in
Hawaii seems like a network television stunt, rather than a
well-considered story. The pacing is sluggish and the script plods. I
was frequently bored, and INHUMANS failed to spark the same wonder and
excitement that Marvel routinely does in their feature films (and
occasionally does in their other small screen projects).
Admittedly, there are worse things on
TV, and because it’s Marvel, I’ll probably still watch it. By keeping
INHUMANS to eight hours, it won’t be allowed to meander too much before
it wraps up the central storylines. A second season might even produce
something more entertaining and interesting. But as a first effort, this
is a disappointment, not among the best Marvel has to offer, and misses
the mark greatly on what should have been a really awesome group of
characters. These should go back to the drawing board.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.