Marvel / ABC

When the credits rolled in WIRED's screening of the IMAX premiere of Marvel's Inhumans, a fellow audience member loudly exclaimed "what the f*** did I just watch?". While his review is more profane and far more concise than our own, he was pretty much on the money: Inhumans is a mess.

Judging from internet chatter, expectations for the show had been low following lacklustre trailers and awkward comic con panels over the summer. Sadly, the final product lives down to those expectations, suffering from shoddy pacing, inconsistent plotting and characterisation, and a cheap, rushed look to everything. Be warned: mild spoilers lay ahead.


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Unimaginatively titled "The First Chapter", the twin-episode – edited into a single, movie-length feature for the cinema screen – introduces the Royal Family of the Inhumans. King Black Bolt (Anson Mount), Queen Medusa (Serinda Swan), cousins Karnak, Triton, and Gorgon (Ken Leung, Mike Moh, and Eme Ikwuakor, respectively), and Medusa's sister Crystal (Isabelle Cornish) are the inner circle, while Bolt's brother Maximus (Game of Thrones' Iwan Rheon) schemes scornfully from the sidelines, jealously coveting the throne.

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First, a brief primer. The Inhumans as a species are an offshoot of humanity, genetically tampered with by the alien Kree millennia ago in an attempt to unlock their own stalled evolutionary process. First appearing in the comics in Fantastic Four #45 in 1965, created by Jack Kirby and Stan Lee, they share some conceptual similarities with the mutants in X-Men – Inhumans each have unique powers, but require exposure to a substance called 'Terrigen' to activate their latent abilities.

The race, if not the Royals, has already been introduced to television viewers through Agents of SHIELD, where Terrigen was released into Earth's food chain, then water cycle, accidentally triggering terrigenesis in people at random. It's a connection that gets only the barest of references here though, which seems a mistake in any shared universe, let alone a show set to air on the same TV network in the US, ABC.


The Royal Inhumans live in seclusion though, in an isolated city-state on the moon. Called Attilan, here it's weird mix of science fantasy influences from the comics and Soviet-era brutalist architecture. The latter is somewhat fitting – the society Bolt rules over is deeply hierarchical, bordering on oppressive. People who draw the short straw in terrigenesis – the ones who emerge with weak, useless, or ugly results – are relegated to the lowest castes of society.

While Black Bolt and family are presented as the "good guys", with powers like super-strong prehensile hair (Medusa), control of the classical elements (Crystal), or a sonic voice that can melt steel (Black Bolt, rendering him functionally mute, communicating through sign language with Medusa) it's hard to argue with Maximus, who wins over the hearts and minds of the people on the bottom rung of the ladder before he stages an inevitable coup.

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This is something that's becoming an increasingly noticeable problem in superhero media – heroes who don't do anything the slightest bit heroic. Here, the Royals lord it over the little people, with Crystal in particular painted as a spoiled princess, and yet the audience is somehow supposed to feel sympathy when they're deposed. There's a massive emotional disconnect between what we're told and what we're shown.

The biggest problem is a brutally rushed production schedule. Inhumans started shooting in March, meaning a brief six month window to complete principal photography and effects work, and it shows in the underwhelming results on screen. Or rather, it doesn't show, as Inhumans skimps almost entirely on said effects.

Showrunner Scott Buck – fresh off Netflix's Iron Fist – told Entertainment Weekly back in May that Medusa's hair was "very difficult" and took "quite a long time in post to make that effect work", a problem solved by shaving her hair early on. It's an uncomfortable scene, a literal mutilation, and Swan laudibly conveys the horror Medusa experiences in that moment. What we do see of her serpentine locks in action before that though is some of the worst effects work you'll see, even compared to other genre TV shows.

So too goes Triton – an aquatic fishman, requiring extensive make-up and prosthetics – who is killed off in the opening moments. Don't expect that death to last the entire series, but it gets an expensive, visually tricky character off-screen for the entirety of the premiere. Even Lockjaw, the Inhumans' giant, teleporting (and poorly constructed in CGI) dog gets temporarily written out, once he's fulfilled his plot device duty of escorting the Royals from Attilan to Hawaii, where the majority of the show takes place.

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Inhumans rapidly sheds as much of the weirdness baked into the core concept as possible. Even Black Bolt's regal garb is dropped for a sharp suit (to be fair, it's not that great a loss – like most of the Inhuman costuming in the show, it looks incredibly cheap). What's left is a bunch of attractive actors with very few differences to 'normal' humans, wandering around the beautiful scenery of Oahu, looking bewildered and only rarely using powers. The cast seems to have about as much idea what's going on as the audience.


What really baffles though are the sheer inconsistencies and seeming lack of thought put into the show. The Inhumans have advanced smartwatches that fold out to a full phone screen's size, but they don't have text messaging to allow their mute king to communicate? Gorgon, who has cloven hooves and goat legs, regularly seems to have regular calves and wears boots made for feet – possibly another sacrifice to budget and time constraints. Maximus is the villain mostly because we're told he is, with only a late shift towards murderous intent given Rheon reason to break out a streak of his Ramsay Bolton-honed sadism.

Worst of all, the premiere ends without setting up any stakes beyond "reclaim the throne of Attilan" or establishing why the audience should care – and with no news of a UK broadcaster to air the remainder of the eight-episode season at time of writing, it scarcely matters even if they did.

The Inhumans have the potential to be great characters, but this show does them a disservice. The cast does their best but between the meagre aesthetics and sloppy writing, they're fighting a losing battle. Even the IMAX presentation does Inhumans no favours. The first major misstep of the shared Marvel Cinematic Universe.