MOVIE REVIEW: FTN reviews the Imax release of Inhumans pilot

Anyone who has been following the Marvel television series Agents Of SHIELD will know of the Inhumans since they were introduced during the show’s second season. The Inhumans are a small percentage of the population who are descended from genetically altered humans who, when exposed to a process called terragenesis, gain a wide variety of super-human abilities.

Marvel’s latest television series follows the royal family of the Inhumans, currently living on a hidden colony on the moon called Attila, ruled by their king Black Bolt and his queen Medusa. Because of the nature of the terragenesis process, the type of ability an Inhuman receives is dependant on what their society needs, and so as a result of this Attila is a caste society where people live in their assigned roles. This is something that Black Bolt’s brother Maximus wishes to see change, and continually pushes for the Inhumans to return to Earth.

The Inhumans was originally slated to appear as part of Marvel’s Cinematic Universe (MCU) third phase when it was announced a few years back, but was removed (here) from that once they were introduced as a storyline in Agents Of SHIELD which then opened the way for this television version to take its place. The series will premiere in the US at the end of September, but as a special event, the pilot episodes were filmed with Imax cameras and a special version of the pilot has been shown in Imax theatres.

While it is not the complete pilot (it runs a minuscule 77 minutes in length – most likely to remove scenes that are purely setup of characters and elements we will not really see until later in the series), it does contain the crux of the first two episodes and gives us a setup of the series and what to expect, though elements as always, may be changed when the final versions of the episodes air.

At least, that’s what we hope, because sadly, Inhumans is not a great start to what has potential to be a good show. The pilot is best described as problematic, with pacing key amongst the issues that prevent it from being a truly great pilot. Certain elements such as Maximus’ motivations and actions seem to rush along at a dizzyingly expedited rate without any real sense that he has been plotting his actions for some time previous to the start of the series, and yet other elements such as the main characters being transported to Earth seem to take a long time when they feel like they should be happening a lot faster.

No doubt some of this will be as a result of scenes removed from the Imax version as the runtime is too short compared to that of two regular television episode runtime (it is definitely the first two episodes as the cast & crew credits do state ‘Part 1’ and ‘Part 2’), but other parts of it just feel like poor writing, either making jumps to attempt to speed up the narrative, or adding in filler to extend plotlines throughout further episodes.

In all honesty, Inhumans is what it is, it’s a television pilot, it is not a feature film that requires or truly takes advantage of the Imax format. But while there have been some views expressed about the level of competency with which is it made, it is not quite as poor as some have made it out to be. Compared to recent other Marvel television series such as the Netflix series of Iron Fist, it is not as poorly constructed than that show’s earlier episodes, but sadly it can also be said that it’s not really any better. The series may improve during the remaining six episodes, but if not, at least we haven’t wasted too much time with an entire 13 episodes.

2 out of 5 nerds