Marvel's 'Inhumans' and That Awful Trailer
I have always had a soft spot for the Marvel Comics characters of the Inhumans. True the 
powers that be at the House of Ideas are have spent the past couple of years trying to make these characters the new equivalent to the X-Men to no avail. This is mainly because they are the apples to the X-Men's oranges. Created by Marvel godfathers Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, the Inhumans has mainly followed the royal family of a race of humans who modified and given superhuman abilities by the Kree. This is a property which Kirby left his fingerprints all over, an advanced civilization of humanoids in strange costumes who for a long while lived on the moon, screams of the influence the King of Comics had in their creation.
With Marvel on a hot streak in bringing their cinematic universe to the big and small screens recently it is no surprise that Black Bolt and his clan have had their names tossed around quite a bit. Marvel Studios long discussed bringing the Inhumans to the big screen, instead they are being brought to television with a pilot filmed for the IMAX format. When the cast started being reported, fans were optimistic due to the choices. Iwan Rheon, who became the most hated villain on TV on Games of Thrones was cast as Maximus the Mad. Fresh off his acclaimed stint on Hell on Wheels, Anson Mount seemed perfectly cast as Black Bolt. Serinda Swan is a television veteran who seemed poised to breakout in the role of Inhuman queen Medusa. The biggest problem came from behind the camera when it was announced that Scott "I don't like superheroes actually wearing costumes" Buck (I'm assuming that's his middle name) was pegged to be the showrunner. Buck is fresh off of working as a showrunner on Iron Fist the series which is attributed to ruining Marvel's hot streak of shows on Netflix. When the reveal poster for Marvel's Inhumans showed up, fans could not help but laugh at how cheap it looked, but they had not seen anything yet. Because recently the first trailer hit to a collective groan.
First thing people may notice is that the crazy Kirby-esque visuals of the world they reside in is gone, in its place is a sterile and bland setting. The costuming and Medusa's wig look just as cheap on video as they did in the initial reveal pic, luckily the teleporting dog Lockjaw looks great, so I am assuming that's where the budget went. Strangely for a group called the Inhumans, these people look very human. Gone is Karnak's bulbous head, and Triton's aquatic look is nowhere in the throne room. In comics a good number of the Inhumans; have wings, or are on fire, or made of rock or any number of appearances outside of the normal. This says nothing of the abrupt tonal change in the trailer of Black Bolt finding himself in sunny Hawaii which comes off as an incredibly jarring change.
Perhaps I am simply overeating to a bad trailer, and I truly hope I am. But with this being a show ABC is hoping to make this series a flagship show for the network, one would hope for a better first look. If the money was spent to go so far as to film this show in IMAX, you would think the powers that be would want to put their first foot forward. But a stumble out of the gate in promoting this show does not instill a lot of enthusiasm in fans creating an obstacle that Marvel's Inhumans will have to work harder to overcome.
