The secret society of Inhumans has lived peacefully in a hidden colony on the Moon for countless centuries, hidden from the people of Earth. But a challenge to the authority of the Inhuman Royal family threatens to shatter this order forever.

It’s honestly difficult to know what Marvel was thinking when they commissioned Inhumans as a TV series. The necessary scope (a whole secret city on the Moon) and the power of the characters (a main protagonist who can’t speak even the quietest whisper without causing mass destruction) don’t suggest themselves as ideal targets for a TV budget. Moreover, like the Guardians of the Galaxy, the characters in Inhumans are from the more obscure end of the Marvel Comics stable, and as such, may struggle to appeal to the wider audience demographic so crucial to success on network television.

Still, here we are, and the first two episodes are presented for your viewing delight in IMAX (non-3D) as a feature length (ish – 71 minutes) at the cinema.

First of all, IMAX tickets don’t come cheap, so one might justifiably expect some special visual treats in store for this – especially given the otherworldly subject matter. One might, but one would be wrong. From the cloven hooves of Gorgon, head of the Royal Guard, to the painfully obvious wig of Medusa, wife of the King and finally the frankly sub-par standard of the CGI for Lockjaw, a 2,100 pound teleporting dog, the visual effects on display are a painful and constant reminder of the TV rather than Hollywood budget at work here.

Still, Agents of SHIELD has managed four seasons of mostly decent entertainment on that sort of budget, so as long as the story and characters are good, then what’s a little loss of visual fidelity between friends?

Well, that’s where the issues really begin. The writing occupies some bizarre middle point between expository dialogue for the sake of it, while not actually explaining the important things not at all. So we get clunky, out of place bits of speech from Maximus about Crystal’s past and parents, but no real sense of why Maximus resents his brother the King so much, or what drives him to mount a coup against him (this is all stuff freely shown in the trailer so no spoilers here). This pattern continues throughout, and when the dialogue isn’t just info-dumping bizarrely irrelevant details on the audience while missing out the basics we might actually want to know, it’s just cliché-ridden and nonsensical.

As an example of how frustrating and utterly un-self-aware this can be, the opening scene between Medusa and Black Bolt has the former say to the latter ‘Can you remember the time before we were King and Queen?’ and then, in answer to his obvious mute response ‘No, neither can I.’ So what does that mean? How did these two become King and Queen? Can they literally not remember or is this a metaphor? Has it been centuries? Are they immortal? Who were the King and Queen before them? How does the caste system in the city of Attilan actually work? What makes them worthy? Nope, none of that, because it’s time for some more clunky semi-exposition of something else you don’t care about.

In terms of casting, it’s difficult to actually like any of the characters bar one. Anson Mount is a gifted physical actor, with a fantastically expressive face, obviously ideal for a mute character. It’s telling that his character – who has no actual dialogue – is head and shoulders the most watchable and the most likeable of the show. When we come to the inevitable Marvel Fish Out of Water Sequence™ his comedy mugging and startled expressions are used to great effect. Unfortunately, we also have to spend time with everyone else. Serinda Swan is obviously trying for imperious and proud, but she lacks the physical presence or assertive quality for either, and comes off simply as a poorly cast actor in someone else’s role – an impression deepened by the sheer obviousness of her giant red wig. Ken Leung comes off as someone playing an autistic-type character having watched Rain Man for preparation. Eme Ikwuakor’s Gorgon reminds me of Michael Jai White’s Al Simmons in the 1997 Spawn movie, all growly machismo with no really obvious quality that would mark him out as a leader of men, let alone head of the Royal Guard. Isabelle Cornish’s Crystal seems to mainly have the power of commanding giant CGI dog Lockjaw to teleport herself and others where the plot deems it necessary for them to be. And then, there’s Iwan Rheon as Maximus.

As far as I can tell from comments from the creative team, the drive for Maximus in the TV show was for a complex, nuanced villain character. Where that drive went is beyond me. Watching the pilot, it struck me that the main reason Rheon had been cast was because genre viewers would likely already know of his Game of Thrones character and therefore associate him with villainy. It’s the only reasonable explanation because the show certainly gives none. Oh sure, he’s an Inhuman who apparently was rendered completely human by his terrigenesis process, so there’s the resentment of being powerless in a society of (mostly) powered people, but it never feels like enough. There’s no clear motivation for his actions, meaning he ends up more pantomime villain than nuanced bad guy. Comparisons to Loki (made by the crew of the show) are frankly laughable.

That society is also one of the unaddressed questions – we get a basic sense that those who undergo the terrigenesis process and don’t come away with a power because of it are forced to ‘work in the mines’ but there’s no indication of why this is, who created this caste system, why it’s ‘fair’ or what they are even mining for.

What confuses me is that there seem to be so many easily avoidable mistakes here. The show is clearly linking into, rather than overwriting, the Inhumans storyline from Agents of SHIELD, and it strikes me that perhaps a cameo from a cast member or two from that show, or even some tangential reference to it, might have helped ground proceedings a little more. If you were going for a nuanced villain, then give us more of his origin, and maybe cast a less well-known actor. If you want us to sympathise with the characters, make them sympathetic, give us motivation and depth.

It gives me no pleasure to say it, but Inhumans represents – for me – the first significant misstep of the MCU. It’s a risky proposition anyway, taking obscure and bizarre characters and attempting to introduce them to a wider audience. It feels, unfortunately, like the logical conclusion of a studio drunk on its own success, having taken one obscure bunch of misfits and making a successful franchise, thinking they can do it again with no problem. There’s a sense of a lack of effort, of a taking-for-granted of the audience. I suspect that they won’t get the result they were after, and whereas I’ll be sad to see a Marvel Studios project fail, hopefully it will teach them valuable lessons for the future.

Verdict: Dull, incoherent and lazy. The contrast between this and the recent Legion could not be starker. It’s not even bad enough to get angry about or to qualify as ‘so bad it’s good’. It’s just poor, and even the talents of Anson Mount can’t save it. 2/10

Greg D. Smith