The Inhumans arrives on Friday in 1,000 Imax screens across the US and UK, with its first two episodes reformatted as a 75-minute would-be blockbuster.

 Iwan Rheon, the Misfits star turned sausage-waggling sadist Ramsay Bolton in HBO’s megahit, plays the revolutionary Maximus, a non-superpowered Inhuman looking to upend the status quo. As Ramsay, Rheon proved himself a big talker, which is just as well as Maximus’s brother and main opponent Black Bolt – the king of Attilan, embodied by Hell on Wheels cowpoke Anson Mount – is essentially mute, since a mere whisper from his lips unleashes overwhelming destructive power.

The rest of the superpowered Inhumans family hews closely to the cosmically strange 1960s characters created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby: element-controlling ingenue Crystal, amphibious infiltrator Triton and beastly palace guard enforcer Gorgon, who can trigger earthquakes with a clop of his mighty hooves. Black Bolt’s queen is the most wigged-out of all: Medusa (played by Serinda Swan) is a regal redhead whose long flowing hair also functions as an extra set of limbs she can use to restrain foes.

It does all seem faintly ridiculous. The interiors of Attilan look bland, bare and brutalistic, while the costuming and production design manage neither grandeur or grit. The reveal that Black Bolt and his followers will get kicked out of Attilan and end up on Earth also recalls the 1987 Masters of the Universe movie, whose producers, tasked with staging a sweeping war epic beyond the stars, chucked He-Man through a cosmic portal to New Jersey so they could shoot on contemporary streets.  The TV series begins on 29 September in the US.

Earthquake-triggering hooves and sentient hair might sound exciting, but the Inhumans has so far struggled to generate any positive buzz. The unfamiliarity with the characters and the neither fish-nor-fowl Imax/TV rollout has muddied the message, to the extent that there is a growing and almost gleeful expectation that it will be Marvel’s biggest critical flameout since the thumbs-down reaction to Netflix’s Iron Fist.

Hey, that’s, like, just your opinion, man. Here, have a look and make up your own mind!