Not so super
(This review contains
spoilers!)
If you’re a regular reader of this
blog, you’re probably familiar with my love of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. I never miss an episode, and I’m usually one
of the first online cooking up theories about what’s going to happen next. So
when it was announced that S.H.I.E.L.D would
be taking an extended break to make way for a show based on the Inhuman Royal
Family from the comics, I wasn’t too happy. Still, I was intrigued. Inhumans has had a lot of
behind-the-scenes woes in the MCU, starting as a movie before it slowly
transformed into the miniseries you see today.
But even before the actual show began,
Inhumans was slammed by critics and
fans alike, calling it the lowest bar for the MCU franchise to date and an
insult to the comic book characters. My opinion?
Yeah, they’re not wrong. But if you’re
like me and you enjoy watching bad movies just so you can heckle over them,
this episode alone is a goldmine.
Much like Tommy Wiseau’s legendarily
bad movie The Room, everything is done so spectacularly
awful that it does a complete 180 and somehow becomes great again. The writing
is atrocious. The acting is stilted and stiff. The plot makes no sense
whatsoever. The main characters are either unlikeable or barely onscreen. The
pacing moves way too fast. Everything comes together to create a perfect
trainwreck that you can’t tear your eyes away from no matter how hard you try.
Set in the hidden city on the moon
known as Atillan, Inhumans tells the
story of the Inhuman royal family. Black Bolt, the king of Atillan, is silent
thanks to his powers of supersonic screams every time he makes any sort of
noise. His wife Medusa can manipulate her hair however she wants. Their friend
Karnak has some sort of deus-ex machina power that is never explained, and
there’s a few others there too. Bolt’s brother Maximus is the only one of them
to have no powers, and he’s angry about it. So angry, in fact, that he wants to
take over the city.
He accomplishes this goal in about three minutes.
So let’s start with the characters. I
don’t blame the poor actors for anything that went wrong here. When it comes to
things like this, I have a saying: If one actor gives a bad performance, they’ve
been miscast. If all the actors give a bad performance, they’re stuck with a
bad writer, director, or both. I like to call this the “Attack of the Clones Clause”. And yes, this episode falls into the
latter category. Nobody gives a good performance here, but some of them are
clearly trying their best to work with what they were given. Medusa and Karnak
are both given some cool and fun moments to work with, and Black Bolt has a
strong advantage in that he doesn’t have to deliver any of this awful dialogue.
That doesn’t stop him from running around with sad puppy-dog eyes all the time
for some reason, but he’s probably the best human character in the show.
Easily the character who got it the
worst is Maximus. I guess they were kinda going for a Loki in the first Thor movie-esque plotline here, but he
comes across as more goofy than threatening thanks to the direction the actor
was given. The entire first episode is spent watching him go from person to
person saying “I should be king! Listen to me! Black Bolt doesn’t know what he’s
doing!” He does this three times in the span of less than one commercial break.
He also seems to have an addiction to putting his hand on other people’s
shoulders. I don’t know why, but every time he’s in a scene with this one kid
character that’s what he does.
The writing is the clear catalyst for
what went wrong here. The characters all have personalities more befitting of
cardboard than cool alien superheroes. Black Bolt is a stony loner, Medusa is
his awesome wife, Karnak is the wisecracking warrior, Maximus is annoying, and
Gorgon and Crystal share the personality trait of not having any. They’re all
built with the foundations of a house made of popsicle sticks, and they end the
episode exactly the same people as when it started.
Things could be better if they had
better lines to say, but man, some of this stuff makes your jaw drop at how
multiple people had to look at the script and say “Yeah, this is good”. A personal favourite of mine is when this
random scientist lady is talking to her superior. He tells her something along
the lines of “You used to be brilliant with a bit of nutty. But now the nutty
is pushing the brilliant out.” Honestly, that sums up the show better than I
could ever do.
Inhumans
made a big boast about how it was the first TV show to be filmed in IMAX
cameras, but boy howdy, was that ever a mistake. The budget quality of the show
is extremely apparent thanks to the higher camera quality, making it look like
it was made in the late 90’s instead of 2017. Medusa’s costume looks like it
waltzed straight off the set of a cheesy David Hasselhoff music video, and her
wig isn’t much better.
The only saving grace this show has is
Lockjaw, the giant teleporting bulldog. He looks pretty good when you consider
the TV quality, but, as per the budget, whenever he’s onscreen the writers seem
to be working overtime to make sure he gets offscreen before too long. Like,
imagine if in the last season of Agents
of S.H.I.E.L.D Robbie only turned into Ghost Rider once or twice, and even
then he went back to normal in under a minute. That’s how much we get of
Lockjaw here.
Last but not least, the fight scenes
are gloriously badly choreographed. Karnak vs. some guards looks like it could’ve
worked if it were set in an aquarium floating in space, but as it wasn’t it
just looked silly. Punches are stilted, slow and silly-looking, almost looking
like a beat-‘em up arcade game brought to life. It’s something that needs to be
seen to be believed.
My advice? If you really want to check
Inhumans out to see just how bad it
is, grab some friends, snacks and drinks, and get ready to Mystery Science Theatre 3000 the crap out of it. Trust me, it gives
you plenty of material. Every decision made left me laughing out loud, from the
script to the characters to the contradictions to things that happened earlier
in the same episode. It’s a hoot and a half for all the wrong reasons.
FINAL SCORE
2/10
Awful
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