Posts Tagged ‘MCU’

You Should Do Some Homework Before Getting Into Marvel’s Inhumans

Friday, September 1st, 2017

Patrick Gleason and I were able to check out the Imax presentation of Marvel’s Inhumans last night. Everyone is wondering if it’s worth tuning in for. My answer is that it depends on how into the MCU and Marvel’s comics you are.

 

I think someone who is starting without any background knowledge is going to find themselves lost pretty quickly. If you’ve been following Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. you’ll understand how Inhumans fit into the wider MCU. Marvel’s Inhumans references events from the season two finale of AoS.

 

If you don’t know anything about the Inhumans in the comics, you might feel lost with the television show. “Who are these characters and why should I care about them,” is not really dealt with in the first two episodes. Iwan Rheon’s Maximus is the most interesting of the main characters. His motivations are clear and sympathetic. It’s only when he channels Ramsay Bolton that we get a sense that he’s the villain.

 

Anson Mount does a good job of portraying Black Bolt. It must be a real challenge to portray a character that won’t talk. He has a regal bearing, but you can tell that he prefers to be kind and peaceful rather than cruel and violent. However, his answer to Maximus’ concerns is always “Trust your king”, but the audience never gets a sense of what Black Bolt might be planning to address those concerns. We certainly get to see why Maximus’ concerns are valid.

 

I don’t think Serinda Swan’s Medusa lives up to my expectations from the comics, though I don’t think it’s the actor’s fault. In the comics Black Bolt and Medusa are yin and yang. He’s silent and stoic. She’s vibrant and emotional. First impressions are always a question of who is really ruling Attilan. As we get to know the characters we understand that the two of them are so in sync that it’s obvious that Medusa is accurately representing Black Bolt.

 

In the television show, Medusa is regal, as she should be, but she is not as expressive as her comic book counterpart. In all the images of her we see from the show she is standing straight and stiff. Even her hair hangs straight. In the comics her presentation is always dynamic. She stands in power poses. Her hair is always in motion like the writhing snakes of her namesake. I understand the limitations of technology and budget, but we never see that dynamism from Medusa until after the coup and her hair is neutralized.

 

Karnak, played by Ken Leung, is also different from his comics counterpart. In the comics Karnak is able to find the weakness in any object or plan. In the show he is able to analyze a situation in an instant, and we get nifty CGI graphics to show this. I like this change to his abilities, but it does open some plot holes. The coup does not come as a surprise to him, but the extent of it does. Karnak should be the instigator of the royal family’s escape. Instead he efficiently adapts to the events as they unfold without activating any of the counters he should have had prepared.

 

Crystal is an enigma to me in the show just like she is in the comics. I never understood her powers or why she’s there. In the comics she always seems to be the proxy for the audience, giving us a chance to witness the events unfolding. In the show she is blasé about her royal duties and impulsive like a child. I hope Isabelle Cornish can make her a more interesting character.

 

Eme Ikwuakor’s Gorgon relies on his physical power too much for the role he has in the royal court. His demonstrations of his strategy and tactics explains why Maximus was so successful.

 

When Patrick and I left the theatre and discussed our thoughts on the show, we had to constantly remind ourselves that we had just watched the first two episodes of a television series, not a movie. The unanswered hints of plot threads and glaring questions are okay. Most of them should be addressed in the future. Like any series, there will be season one growing pains.

 

Hopefully this show will have a stronger connection to AoS than a throw-away line of dialogue. Daisy Johnson is an Inhuman. Events from the two shows need to influence each other. Was Jiaying, Daisy’s mother, and her group known to or working with Attilan? Why is it in AoS humans are killed by the terrigen mist, but in Attilan the mist either gives powers or leaves a person as an ordinary human. Do the residents of Attlian understand their connection to the Kree? How will Black Bolt and Maximus handle the growing number of powered Inhumans on Earth?

 

As a complete aside, I have to wonder if Marvel is ever going to make use of the Eternals and Deviants. Inhumans do work as surrogate mutants, and they do explain the existence of metahumans, but the Deviants could do this without having to have terrigen contaminate the water. The Celestials and Thanos have already been introduced to the MCU, so the groundwork exists. I would love to see any of the Marvel shows reveal that there has been a secret war going on since before humans became civilized.

 

The Tie That Binds

Wednesday, May 14th, 2014

Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. aired its season finale. I enjoyed it, though I am with those who feel it didn’t live up to their expectations. It did, however, live up to its promises. The finale got me even more excited for Guardians of the Galaxy.

When the series was announced one its objectives was to open the Marvel Universe to only knew the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It had to show that what we saw on the big screen was part of a world that included secret organizations, weird occurrences, aliens, and super powers.

The show’s connection to the MCU goes all the way back to the first Iron Man movie in the form of Agent Phil Coulsen. The premier episode introduced us to Centipede which was a variation of Extremis, which we saw in Iron Man 3.

Thor: The Dark World had a more obvious presence on MAoS. The team was involved in the cleanup of the aftermath from the movie. They eventually encountered three different Asgardians, including Sif, played by Jamie Alexander. I’m happy to say her presence as a major player in an episode showed that Marvel won’t be afraid to bring people from the big screen onto the smaller one. By extension, we should also expect to see some of the small screen players jumping to the big screen.

As the season reached its climax we found out that the main story arc was tied to Captain America: The Winter Soldier. This was wonderfully done. No one needed to have seen either the TV show or the movie to understand the other, but events unfolded in such a way that both shows were that much more interesting when the connections were made.

This brings me to the upcoming Guardians of the Galaxy. If you haven’t been keeping up with MAoS, be prepared for some *spoilers* if you keep reading.

The onscreen versions of the X-Men and mutantkind in general are firmly in the grasp of Fox. This severely limits not only what characters Marvel can include in the MCU, but what types of characters are available. Marvel’s solution is the Inhumans.

For anyone who doesn’t know who they are, the Inhumans are a branch of humanity that were genetically modified by the Kree, an alien race. At puberty an Inhuman is exposed to the Terragen Mists which activate their powers. All in all, the Inhumans are a simple, in-house solution to Marvel’s mutant problem.

Coulsen was brought back to life through a drug made from the bodily fluids of the corpse of a large, blue alien. The Kree were one of the races Sif listed as matching the alien’s description. This same drug kept Skye, one of Coulson’s team members, from dying. We have been told that Skye is more than she seems. Unravelling her mystery is likely going to be a major story arc for the second season.

Skye’s blood was used to synthesize a variant of the drug which was used to save Garrett, the major villain of the season. The drug obviously had more than a healing effect on Garrett. When he wasn’t fighting Coulson’s team or killing US Army generals, Garrett was gushing about his new-found understanding of humanity’s future. He even drew an odd diagram on a glass wall.

It should be noted that after Coulson took a close look at the diagram he started carving an even more elaborate version into a wall.

Guardians of the Galaxy has a strong Kree presence. We know that Ronan the Accuser plays a major role in the story. We saw Korath the Pursuer in the trailer. The modern comic book version of the Guardians started with some characters who had ties to Thanos, introduced at the end of The Avengers.

Everyone is assuming the Guardians movie will bring us that much further into an Infinity Gauntlet movie arc. That probably is its major goal. However, after seeing Garrett and Coulson’s diagrams in the MAoS finale, I think Guardians of the Galaxy is going to bring the Terragen Mists to Earth so that the population of supers in the MCU is going to grow dramatically.