Marvel's Inhumans: TV Premiere Review Round-Up

There’s a superhero series called the Inhumans, and if you haven’t heard of it yet, you will [...]

By Megan Peters

There's a superhero series called the Inhumans, and if you haven't heard of it yet, you will soon. This week, ABC will premiere Marvel's Inhumans on television following the miniseries' IMAX run earlier this year. The show failed to impress with its first debut, but Inhumans plans to show out on September 29 with an extended premiere. However, if the reviews of the show's cable outing are right, then fans shouldn't expect ABC to have tidied the series up.

With Inhumans premiering tomorrow, press sites like The Hollywood Reporter and Variety have made their TV reviews of the show public. You can check out several responses to the show in the slides below, but you should know one thing; They aren't all that flattering.

There may not appear to be much difference between Inhumans' IMAX and TV premiere, but it appears to be a noticeable addition. Fans learned the series would add about ten minutes to its network debut compared to its theatrical run. Marvel TV Jeph Loeb went so far as to call the television premiere a "variant cover," implying that the TV edition would have the same story with just a few extra details added in.

If you've seen the Inhumans pilot in IMAX, then ABC will entice you for another go with its additional runtime. The reviews below can help fans decide whether it is worth watching the premiere for a second time, even if the critiques are painful to read at times.

You can check out ComicBook's IMAX review of Inhumans here.

Variety

"Remember how critics laid into "Iron Fist" a few months ago? The showrunner from that unloved program, Scott Buck, moved over to "Marvel's Inhumans." Somehow he's outdone himself: "Iron Fist" looks like "Citizen Kane" next to this slapped-together, incoherent, cheap-looking mess.

Do not spend any of your limited time on this planet watching this show. If you have a superpower, use it to race away from "Inhumans" faster than the speed of light." - Variety

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USA Today

"Marvel has taken weird characters and strange stories before and adapted them smartly into commercial and critical hits (Guardians of the Galaxy and Jessica Jones among others). But not all comic books are the same, and some things resist adaptation. Inhumans isn't a natural fit for broadcast TV, and choices the creators made in adapting it only make things worse.

Maybe it's time to pick a different comic from the trove." - USA Today

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The Hollywood Reporter

"The first two hours of Marvel's Inhumans, slightly changed in ways I can't identify from the IMAX cut, introduce us to the royal family of Attilan, a secret city on the moon where a ritual called Terrigenesis brings out genetically inscribed powers in the upper caste and forces the ability-free to toil away in lunar mines as part of an economic system that doesn't make a lick of sense. Black Bolt (Anson Mount), he of a killer voice that has made him voluntarily mute, is the king, married to Medusa (Serinda Swan), gifted with the ability to control her long, red, computer-generated hair. Black Bolt's entourage includes cousins Gorgon (Eme Ikwuakor), whose power is either hunting or just having hooves, and Karnak (Ken Leung), blessed with a power that both writer Scott Buck and director Roel Reine have been unable to express onscreen. My best guess on Karnak's power was "practical nihilism," but that may just have been how I was feeling as I watched Inhumans, not that Leung, the best human piece of the cast, is at fault." - The Hollywood Reporter

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Vox

"The underlying lesson of every Marvel superhero story is to never give up. Spider-Man pinned under a crumbling building? Don't give up. Kitty Pryde trapped in an intergalactic bullet hurtling through space? Don't give up. The Avengers fighting Chitauri forces while locked out of Earth because of a force field and a turncoat Steve Rogers? Don't ever give up.

But in the case of the Inhumans, the stars of Marvel's latest television show, maybe the better lesson is knowing when to actually give up." - Vox

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UPROXX

"The more the show focuses on the alien of it all, the worse it gets. Maximus is presented as an utter monster for wanting to abolish Inhuman traditions and take everyone away from their moon city and its lack of resources, when it's the caste system that Black Bolt and the others support that seems awful. This could be good fodder for a more thoughtful and morally grey drama that was willing to question whether its heroes are at all heroic, but this is all done in the broadest and most simplistic fashion possible. Black Bolt is good because we're told he is, despite evidence suggesting he's running a cruel dictatorship, and Maximus is bad because he's played by Ramsay from Game of Thrones. That's it.

The whole thing — whether on the moon or down here on Earth — also looks incredibly cheap, given the resources Marvel has at its disposal. None of Marvel's TV shows have ever resembled budget-busters (the Netflix urban vigilante shows can devote long chunks of time to two people talking in a small room), but it's much more noticeable on a show aiming for a vastly bigger scale than Agents of SHIELD or Jessica Jones has aspired to. There are a few sequences — a chase scene in the opening minutes, our early glimpses of Attilan, a slow-mo fight in Oahu — that you can tell were shot for the IMAX experience. Maybe they look cool enough on a giant screen (for the handful of people who paid to see a TV show that would be airing on free TV within a few weeks) to compensate for how thin everything else is, but at TV scale, they're just filler with slightly better digital effects than the rest of it." - UPROXX

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