Inhumans Review

The plan was to make a Marvel property that had never quite worked on the page work on television by opening it on the largest screens available. That plan required Attilan, a hidden lunar city, and a court whose powers are almost all expensive: a king who cannot speak above a whisper without leveling a building, a queen whose hair moves on its own, a teleporting dog. What the production could afford was a quarry, a small standing set and effects that read as unfinished at any size, and premiering that in IMAX turned a modest failure into a public one.

The writing compounds it. Black Bolt cannot speak, and rather than build a visual language for him the series strands him in Honolulu doing extended silent comedy while the coup that should drive the plot happens off screen. Medusa's hair, the one image the property is known for, is written out inside the first hour. Anson Mount is the reason to watch any of it, playing a mute king with real physical precision and getting more across with posture than the scripts manage with dialogue, and Iwan Rheon plays Maximus as an actual political operator rather than a sneer.

The Hawaii location work is pleasant. None of it survives contact with a story that has eight episodes, no second act, and a finale that settles the coup in a single confrontation after seven episodes of circling it.