Cowboy Pete: The Inhumans

In recent days I had been restricting Cowboy Pete to my Patreon account (yesterday I put up reviews of the Game of Thrones season ender and “The Hitman’s Bodyguard.” But I wanted to get word out a bit more widely about the upcoming “Inhumans” series, having seen the first two episodes last night at the Marvel screening. Warning: there are spoilers.

People have been relentlessly bìŧçhìņg about the TV series based upon, well, pretty much everything that we’ve seen of it thus far. Photographs? They don’t look right. Scenes released? They don’t act right or sound right. Which moves me to ask the following question:

What the hëll is WRONG with you people?

First of all, they cast fricking Ramsey Bolton as Maximus. How can you NOT love the casting of the man who cut off Theon’s junk and was last seen being eaten to death by his own starved dogs as Maximus the Mad?

In “The Defenders,” they strive to make the world so real that Jessica Jones had huge amounts of trouble accepting various concepts that comics fans take in stride. There is no hint of reality in “The Inhumans.” How could there be? It starts out on the dámņëd moon where the Inhumans currently live in hiding, afraid that humans will discover them there and then…what? If humans discovered that they were there, humanity would probably shrug and say, “Fine, as long as they stay there, who cares?” Well, except for Trump who would do God knows what. Hmm. Maybe their paranoia is more well founded than I first thought.

But naturally you couldn’t have much of a film if they just hung out on the moon and didn’t do anything. Maximus winds up staging a coup, splitting up the royal family and sending them to different parts of Hawaii, where one would expect Five-0 to be all over them. Fortunately enough, Five-0 is safely on CBS, so the Inhumans have to deal with police of a far more pedestrian nature.

One really has to congratulate the producers with coming up with ways to minimize their make-up and CGI expenses. The heavily made-up Triton? Gone within the first five minutes, ostensibly dead although we can be fairly certain he’s not. Lockjaw? Knocked out three quarters of the way through the first episode where he then basically slept through the entirety of episode 2. Medusa’s hair? They shaved her head in a scene that was so brutal it was as if they were raping her on screen. (Yes, that’s a major plot point, but Marvel just released a trailer where Medusa is shown with her shaved head, so they’re not trying to hide it.).

The bottom line is that shows like “Jessica Jones” and “Luke Cage” are grim and gritty detective or action shows with superpowered people. “Captain America: The Winter Soldier” was a political action thriller with superpowered people. “Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.” is a spy series with superpowered people. “The Inhumans” is a comic book show. That’s it. It doesn’t aspire to be anything beyond that. They took Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s characters and said, “Let’s make a series that Stan could have written and Jack could have drawn,” and they are perfectly happy with that. Now my hope is that fans haven’t become so sophisticated that they have outgrown a perfectly entertaining comic book program.

PAD

27 comments on “Cowboy Pete: The Inhumans

  1. Peter, I’m sorry totell you that I’m not here to comment on “Inhumans”, given that we haven’t seen an episode (and, judging from the way these series are aired in France, we’re not likely to see it anytime soon, but more on that later), but to mention a recurring problem I’ve had on this blog. Too many times now, I’ve been redirected to pages that contain viruses (viri ?). In fact, today, it’s already twice tht it had happened. Thankfully, my antivirus is good enough, but I fear the day when, coming here, I could get a virus that would force me to change my old computer. Something must be done about that problem, and soon. Otherwise, I could very well avoid that site altogether, and I would consider it a shame.

    And ot do at least a on-topic post, may I say that I do agree with what you say : people should really learn to watch something before criticizing it.

    1. I honestly have no idea what you’re talking about, Gerard, because whenever I enter the website, it just brings me to the website. I’ll ask Glenn to check on it but I’ve no clue what could be causing that.
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      PAD

    2. Okay… I’ve never had this problem.
      .
      Are you coming here directly by typing in the address or using a bookmark or coming via posted links elsewhere?

    3. Gerard – where or what are you clicking on or hovering over – and on what page(s)? I’ve been coming to Pete’s blog for years and have NEVER been redirected anywhere other than the intended pages or retailer…

      And to also stay on topic – keep setting your fans and the general public straight, Peter! I’m getting so very, very tired of the criticisms and whining of people that reacting to a notion, not knowledge or thought.

      1. I’m getting so very, very tired of the criticisms and whining of people that reacting to a notion, not knowledge or thought.
        .
        But.. but… Wolverine is short! And not Australian, by god. And Beetleguice would make a lousy Batman. The only possible worse choice would be someone like, I dunno, Ben Affleck perhaps. And nobody can play Spock but Nimoy, anyone else would ruin the movie. And a black Heimdall?? Or a black Human Torch, any movie with that is gonna suck!
        .
        (OK, they were right about that last movie, but it wasn’t because of the casting.)

  2. If Mr. Trump sees or hears mention of the Inhumans on the moon on Fox News or in The National Enquirer, count on a rant to build a Dyson sphere between here and the moon.

  3. I don’t get that anymore. I get acknowledging a bad ad campaign. I’ve seen any number of trailers where I’ve felt like the trailer didn’t do its job, but that’s the advertising team’s fault. But at this point I would think fandom would stop stepping on rakes every time they decide from little or no information that the actual product is horrible and will suck. I mean, it’s Standard Fan Overreaction 101
    .
    Keaton is Batman!?! The movie is ruined!!!
    (Steps on rake)
    The movie was great! Well, greatish. But Keaton was great as Batman!!!
    .
    Alfred Molina is Doc Ock?!? What kind of villain is he going to make? How is he going to come off as threatening to Spider-Man?!?
    (Steps on rake)
    Whoa… Molina was amazing! That was a great take on the character!
    .
    Robert Downey Jr. is Iron Man? The film is ruined! He’ll destroy the film with his mugging and smirking! What was Marvel thinking?!? And, really, Iron Man??? Barely anyone cares about Iron Man. Marvel needs to use one of their a-list heroes for their big tent pole film, not some second stringer! This will bomb! Downey sucks and no one outside of the hardcore Marvel geeks cares about Iron Man!
    (Steps on rake)
    Oh my god… Iron Man was awesome! Downey can’t leave the MCU!!!
    .
    Heath Ledger is the Joker? What the hëll is wrong with Nolan?!? That’s not the Joker! What were they thinking with that design?!? That looks terrible!!! Nolan blew it! Nolan blew it!!
    (Steps on rake)
    OMG! Heath Ledger was amazing as the Joker! He made the film! Ledger better get a posthumous Oscar for that work!
    .
    The pre-release leaked photos from Thor look horrible! Asgard looks like it’s made out of plastic. The Destroyer looks ridiculous! Kenneth Branagh is ruining Thor! What was Marvel thinking?!?
    (Steps on rake)
    Asgrad looks amazing! the Destroyer is awesome! Thor kicks ášš!
    .
    I don’t know… Josh is an okay creator, but he’s not a big picture, big action movie kind of guy. Him doing Avengers?!? I just don’t know that this is going to work out that well.
    (Steps on rake)
    That was the best superhero movie ever. E-V-E-R, people!
    .
    First Class? They’re totally messing up continuity. A reboot?!? We don’t need a reboot!!! This will suck worse than Wolverine: Origins did!
    (Steps on rake)
    The best X-Men film to date. Hands down. Dripping with awesome sauce.
    .
    Guardians of the Galaxy?!? Who? What? Marvel’s Star Wars/Firefly? Ah man, this is going to be Marvel’s first big bomb. This is going to be Marvel’s first big misstep. No one cares about a team that they’ve never heard of. Marvel thinks their stuff doesn’t stink and they can just slap the Marvel label on anything and people will see it, but this one will backfire on them big time.
    (Steps on rake)
    This is the best movie of the year! This is the best Marvel movie they’ve made other than Avengers! OMG was this movie filled with awesome sauce!!!
    .
    Daredevil looks strange in black. OMG, have you seen the last minute ad with the final costume? That looks so cheap! I’m not sure this show is going to be as good as the Marvel movies have been…
    (Steps on rake)
    Daredevil set the new bar for superhero shows. This is better than Arrow! It’s out-Batmaning Gotham!! The actual Daredevil outfit when he finally dons it looks amazing!!!
    .
    Ant-Man?!? Marvel thinks they can shove anything on the fans at this point. Ant-Man is stupid. You can tell this will suck from the ads. No one will see this.
    (Steps on rake)
    That was such a fun freaking movie!!!
    .
    I mean… Decades of this. Relax guys. We’re geeks. We’re supposed to be the smart(ish) ones. Learn from past jumping of the gun mistakes already. There are only so many times you can engage in uninformed, zero information gnashing of teeth and taking rakes to face activity before you have to smarten up.

    1. Yeah, I’ve noticed that people have been predicting doom for superhero movies and TV shows since forever, and the paradox is that the success of several adaptations throughout the years have not made fans any more confident in the genre, quite the opposite in fact.
      .
      My take on why? Okay, here goes the pop psychology. We may be living in the age of geek chic, but the uncomfortable reality is that many of us geeks still feel like this relatively new cultural acceptance will disappear any second. Like the geek guy that manages to gain confidence and get a hot girlfriend, we still fear that any minute now she will realize how uncool we really are and dump us.
      .
      Thus the anxiety over every new movie or TV adaptation. Soon the mass audience of non-geeks will realize how “silly” superheroes are and return to mock us and the genre…
      .
      But, despite the occasional disaster like the Ben Affleck Daredevil and the Fantastic Four movies, this backlash is not happening.

      1. but the uncomfortable reality is that many of us geeks still feel like this relatively new cultural acceptance will disappear any second.”
        .
        A lot of us geeks don’t and never have, cared at all about cultural acceptance. I buy, read and watch what appeals to me. If folks look down on me for it that’s never been my problem.

      2. Well, neither of us could pretend to speak for all geeks. But…
        .
        Personally, social acceptance used to be more important to me when I was a teen, or in my 20s. But in any case, that didn’t stop me from collecting comics or anything.
        .
        It seems to me that just as I got older and a bit more confident and less concerned about what others think about my tastes, then geek chic started. And people were starting to go crazy about Marvel or Game of Thrones just as I started to get a bit blase about it.

    2. Mostly correct. Also, let us not forget the pre-release ‘leaks’ which had the original X-MEN movie with the characters so under powered that they would be carrying sidearms. We know how that turned out.
      .
      However …
      .
      Tastes vary. Yes, FIRST CLASS was better than the first WOLVERINE movie – not exactly a difficult feat – but it wasn’t the best. Give me the first X-Men film where the director at least remembered that Scott ‘Cyclops’ Summers was the first mutant recruited by Xavier. So why wasn’t he in First Class? Or ‘Angel’ who is pìššëd at humans for treating mutants badly and for their objectifying her. So, what does she do in response? Dons a Fredericks of Genosha leather fetish number and joins a group whose first action is to kill a fellow mutant. Hunh? Does the word ‘inconsistent’ come to mind here? Not to mention the film making up its chronology as it goes along. It wasn’t *terrible*, but it could easily have been much better.
      .
      While Heath Ledger was OK as the Joker (I still prefer the animated one voiced to perfection by Mark Hamill) that film did suffer from one inexplicable plot hole: the one the Batman would have fit in if he had been in the movie. Oh, they did have someone who LOOKED like him, but his behaviour made ZERO sense from what we’ve known of the character. No time to enumerate all the screw ups, but one alone … his telling Gordon to blame him for Dent’s death, rather than the Joker who was ultimately responsible. What?! Why? Nothing in the movie has this make a lick of sense. And it’s just one in the list of ways they got the Batman wrong.

      1. StarWolf –
        .
        My opinion on the X-Men movies are complicated. I like most of them on their own terms, but they were always very, very different animals than the comic in its golden years. X-Men comics at their best are a complex soap opera with a big cast. The movies were always about a few characters (Wolverine, Xavier, Magneto, plus one other character per movie), with the others relegated to almost extras.
        .
        Most of the movies at least got the spirit of the comics (the social commentary aspect) right. X-Men: First Class was no worse than other movies in that respect. No movie in the series showed any worries about following comic book continuity. And there were other things in First Class that more than make up for the absence of Cyclops – I LOVE that they finally made a superhero movie that is set in the year the comic it was based on debuted (though I wish they had used this idea for the Fantastic Four reboot, I’d kill for a FF movie heavily inspired by Lee/Kirby and set in the 1960s).
        .
        And in any case, Cyclops was out of the question as they wanted to keep a loose continuity with the first trilogy, except if they made him a toddler in 1962 or something.
        .
        My opinion is that a heavily Claremontian X-Men adaptation would only be possible in a TV show. But then you’d have to scale back on account of TV show budgetary reasons.

  4. Just out of curiosity, is The Inhumans set in the same fictional continuity as Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. is and Agent Carter was? Did those two episodes you watched contain any references to events from Agents? I certainly don’t recall any mention of an Inhuman Royal Family in Agents.

    For that matter, are any or all of these TV series set in the Marvel Cinematic Universe? Or are they part of a separate Marvel Television Universe?

    1. Yes, it definitely is. It contained no references to the Agents, but there are definite allusions to people becoming Inhumans on Earth. I would not be the least bit surprised to see a SHIELD/Inhumans crossover.
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      PAD

    2. And Agents of SHIELD & the Netflix shows all exist in the MCU. The movies (especially Winter Soldier & Avengers 2, but Thor: Dark World to a lesser extent) have directly affected AoS, and they refer to “The Incident” – ie, events of Avengers – at least once per Netflix series, and there have been allusions (without outright name-dropping) to several of the Avengers. And of course Phil Coulson, Nick Fury, and Robin Sherbotsky, I mean Maria Hill, have all been on AoS, while Agent Carter starred, well, Peggy Carter & Howard Stark from Captain America.
      .
      So, yeah. One big happy ginormous shared universe. Which apparently includes Inhumans.
      .
      Legion & the upcoming Gifted, of course, belong to the Fox Mutant stable, are definitely not part of the MCU, and I have no idea if they’re part of the X-Men universe. (Legion doesn’t really seem to be, other than a blink-and-you-miss-it reference to Xavier. But no name-dropping, and it could be their own version of the good Professor.)

  5. Main thing i didn’t like about the trailers (well, things):
    .
    1. Medusa looked … plastic.
    .
    2. The bands in Crystal’s hair – it looks like stripes of hair paint. I always thought that they were some sort of hair bands, holding it back.
    .
    Black Bolt looks good, though.

    1. Medusa’s hair looked a little odd, but since it got shaved, that problem went away. And I never thought those were hairbands in Crys’s hair. I always thought they were weird stripes.
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      PAD

      1. I’m going to be watching, but the trailers have not inspired confidence. Even the show runner basically said he was hired because he could do the job quickly and cheaply.

        As for Medusa getting a hair cut, it may have a story reason, but it is probably going to come across as more of a budgetary reason (again, see: trailers).

      2. It always looked to me that Crystal’s hair was drawn as just naturally having that weird pattern, but I decided that it was a hairband anyway. Afterall, if it were just her hair’s coloration, you’d expect it to lower itself downward as her hair grew out.
        .
        However, if it’s not a hairband, then either her hair doesn’t grow (I doubt that) or it’s a fashion choice and she occasionally washes the die out and re-applies it…which is exactly what I expect is happening on the show, so I guess that’s fine.
        .
        I saw it last night. it was okay, but I would rather have just waited to see it on TV rather than pay IMAX prices. I’ll watch it, however. It’s good enough to be given several more episodes. Afterall, I wasn’t that fond of Supergirl when it started and now it’s very high on my watchlist.

  6. C’mon, we all know what Trump would do if he heard about the Inhumans living on the moon. He would attempt to build a wall between the USA and the moon – and demand the moon pay for it.

  7. Trailers did not wow me and the description above has been a real turn off. I will give it a try with very low expectations and hopefully be surprised.

  8. Saw it today, and couldn’t disagree with you more, Peter, but I’m not prepared to cause a fracas in somebody else’s virtual living room, so I’ll just leave it at that.

  9. Seeing “Cowboy Pete”, my brain saw it as “Spaghetti Pete”, Jamie Oliver’s son….
    (5,4,3,2,1…)

  10. Part of the appeal of the Inhumans it combined Stan Lee’s obsession with royalty and kings, with Kirby’s fantastic depiction of alien technology. It looks like the show has the former but lacks the latter. I’ll check it out and try to keep an open mind but I’m not going to get my hopes up.

    Anyway at least Lockjaw IS a dog.

  11. I saw it Thursday night in an IMaX theater.

    I wondered if what they did to Medusa was to save on the show’s CGI budget. I’m hoping by the end of the season, her long hair will grow back.

    I loved the depiction of Lockjaw teleporting.

    I’d love it if Tom Hiddleston could do a cameo as Loki meeting Maximus.

    I thought Iridia’s wings looked kind of cheap. And I missed her starting as a crone and using the terrain mists to become a truly exotic creature.

    Nice touch thinking that Gorgon’s legs don’t lend themselves to swimming.

    Before the movie, I saw the expanded trailer for Thor — Ragnarok” I was glad to know I’d been pronouncing Ragnarok correctly all these years, and I was pleased to see The Hulk speaking in longer sentences. Maybe next, we could get “Hulk — Joe Fixit?”

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