Eternals was always a gamble, for reasons that were clocked from the starting line. The very concept (created by Jack Kirby) is so macro-level as to almost be absurd: Here is a group who were sent by cosmic creation super beings to protect humanity from bad stuff secretly, and they’ve been doing it since the dawn of our collective species memory.
But Marvel has sold audiences on weird shit before, right? Technology and magic coexisting, astral projection and universe-ending jewelry, talking raccoons and trees who are best friends. This should be a snap!
Wait, we can’t say snap anymore, can we.
[Minor spoilers for Eternals.]
The general feeling about this film—well before its release to the general public—has been a pile-on detailing its many failures, and hailing it as the first Marvel film to truly “disappoint.” This all by itself is hilarious because there are plenty of contenders for that spot in the studio’s thirteen-year run. (I’d give it to Guardians 2 or the first Ant-Man, personally, and even there I’m infuriating someone else who wants to lambast Iron Man 2 or Thor: The Dark World, so it’s clear we’ve all got capital “O” Opinions on the subject.) Marvel films are created via a very specific formula that none of the films have managed to stray far from, regardless of who’s at the wheel. Ergo, when people “don’t like” a Marvel film, the quibbles are often smaller than they imagine them to be.
So does Eternals deserve the sort of ire it seems have garnered? Comparatively, I would say no. But I also cannot ignore the fact that the film—while enjoyable in so, so many places—makes a number of baffling and badly-conceived choices that I’m shocked made any sort of final cut.
Also, there’s an Extremely Dramatic Moment toward the end of the movie that I laughed at so raucously, the entire theater could hear me. I maintain that my reaction was correct because I’m still laughing about the moment. I will continue to laugh at it, probably once a week, for the rest of my life. It was that funny. I can’t wait until it’s a clip on YouTube, so I can troll people with it constantly.
…Which is to say, Eternals is a puzzling viewing experience because it’s packed with a bunch of charming characters and pointed flashbacks and gorgeous locations, but then again, it needed to be at least two movies and doesn’t care remotely about plausibility and also says some alarming things about the state of humanity without seeming to realize that it’s doing so? It’s fun and genuinely interesting in some places, but hard to pack away without picking at every little thing that niggles once it’s over.
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The first hour of the film contains truly heinous dialogue of the people-don’t-talk-like-that variety. There’s a lot of stating the obvious in awkward moments and telegraphing the respective natures of the main characters in the starkest terms. (Our central hero once literally says the sentence “Here, let me help you” during a minor disaster within the first thirty minutes of the film.) The initial set-up is one that the trailer debuted nicely: A group of special powered someones are sent to Earth by a mega-being Celestial named Arishem to protect humans from “the Deviants,” essentially big old predator beasties. They have largely stayed out of human history because they were instructed only to help us when Deviants showed up, but their presence in the world has resulted in them being folded into a large variety of our myths and legends.
This is unfortunately where the confusion begins; we’re told repeatedly that the Eternals (at least, a few of them) adore humanity for all the wondrous things we do and create and feel, despite our many failings and foibles. But the film offers very few examples of humanity doing anything good, focusing instead on the horrors we perpetrate against one another. More importantly, many of the things that are unique and lovely about humanity are often shown to be the result of the Eternals interfering in our history; for example, one flashback to ancient Babylon suggests that the whole city was essentially their idea to keep us protected. During that sequence, Sprite (Lia McHugh) tells the gathered humans a tale about her buddy Gilgamesh (Don Lee), complete with magical visuals.
So that’s one of the greatest cities in history, and now oral storytelling that the Eternals can essentially take credit for? If you’ve ever heard the “ancient astronauts” view of human history—it’s the one where (typically white) people try to insist that the accomplishments of ancient (typically POC) civilizations had to have been aided by alien intervention, or there’s no way we could have made these leaps forward—Eternals can often feel like a primer in that stance, which is not great.
It also has the side effect of making it very hard to understand the feelings of the film’s central character: Sersi is played with radical kindness and compassion by Gemma Chan, but her love of humanity doesn’t jive with what the movie shows us of our species. This isn’t to say that a film concerned with the long arc of human history should blot out our myriad mistakes or our cruelty, but the film itself seems genuinely confused on when we should be lauded, blamed, or utterly apart from the mechanics of the larger story at work. To wit, we see the aftermath of the U.S. bombing of Hiroshima, but this same film also simultaneously suggests that humans didn’t cause climate change. Which, just… what can you do with that.
The film also features a climactic sequence that should literally and irreparably break the planet, but we’re just supposed to go with it and pretend that’s not an issue. (I am usually very generous on the “this scientifically cannot happen” front, but this film managed to make a leap I could not take.) The character who initially seems like the main villain is emphatically not a villain at all, but still treated like one by the heroes, which is equally disconcerting. There are a scant number of philosophical conversations between the Eternals to try and square a few of these issues, but they’re always brief one-sentence exchanges that never delve into the meat and bone of their disagreements. There’s a lot of that going around in this movie. Director Chloe Zhao still gets in a lot of her trademark landscape visuals, though, and that’s a treat every time.
While Chan gives her all in the performance of Sersi, she’s also held back by a script that perpetrates the cardinal betrayal against earnestly “good” characters. This is constantly checked as a problem with characters of the Superman bent—the idea that being a good person who is full to the brim with empathy and love is somehow a boring way to be. This isn’t remotely true… but it is nearly always written that way, hence the belief that goodness is a snooze. Sersi is very much stuck in that role, with no defining characteristics outside her kindness and compassion. She has no tics, no oddities, nothing that makes her stand out in a cast of nearly a dozen main characters. She deserved much better, and now we’ll have to wait for a sequel to see if she ever gets it.
Salma Hayek’s turn as Ajak manages to infuse her own compassion-fueled character with a little extra by virtue of her position as initial leader of the group. And we get something unique with Thena (Angelina Jolie) when it’s discovered that her character has a condition called “mad weary,” which essentially plays out as a form of PTSD, a topic that hasn’t gotten much screentime in the blockbuster arena, and much less so when it surfaces in a woman.
Yet the highlights of the film are largely found in Kumail Nanjiani’s Kingo, Brian Tyree Henry’s Phastos, Don Lee’s Gilgamesh, and Lauren Ridloff’s Makkari. (An honorable mention goes to Barry Keoghan’s Druig, who proves that you can be an asshole and still be worthy of warmth and friendship, unlike a couple other characters who shall remain nameless.) The fact that a gay and a deaf character make up some of the best figures in the movie is always worth recounting, and I would honestly watch an entire movie/series of Kingo doing pretty much anything? So if Marvel would get on that, stat, I’d appreciate it.
This all probably makes it sound like I hated the movie, but I still had a good time? Perhaps it’s because Eternals is a film that lets everything hang out in the open. Or maybe because it straddles that good/bad line for me personally. But either way, it was an experience that I’m eager to share with others, so we can yell our feelings at each other, just like the eponymous heroes of the film.
Emmet Asher-Perrin really loved that CGI rendering of ancient Babylon, though. Even if they took some liberties with the gate. You can bug them on Twitter, and read more of their work here and elsewhere.
Yeah, this was always going to be my least-anticipated installment of Phase Four.
The Eternals have always been like the Inhumans for me. I get that they’re a classic piece of Marvel mythology, but they’ve just never clicked with me.
@1 – Yup. I actually loved the comic book Eternals. The comic book universe actually tied everything together way better than the MCU is doing. The changes are just…changes and not all for the better.
Going to quote my friend Ed who says: “(Eternals creator Jack) Kirby is amazing as an artist and incomprehensible as a writer.” Having just finished an omnibus edition of Kirby’s Eternals, I can safely say that the source material for this movie is no great shakes.
Granted, they may pull from the more comprehensible Material that followed for this movie, but if anything is less viewer friendly than the Inhumans, it’s definitely the Eternals
I read “The Eternals” when they came out in 1976 or so.
Uh…. It was the worst comic book I read at that time. Is Ike Harris really Ikharis? I really felt like I was way ahead of the writing at every stage of this book and “The Eternals” was the first Marvel book I quit reading.
I’m baffled as to why Marvel threw millions of dollars into this project to make it a movie.
Haven’t seen the movie yet, but I loved the Eternals as a concept (not necessarily the stories) when I was still reading comics regularly. ($5 to $10 for a single issue these days is insanity. Who are they publishing these for? Certainly not kids.) Not sure I even finished Neil Gaiman’s run. So perhaps they needed some alterations to make them more interesting for the screen.
At least they got rid of the sky god patriarchy: no Zuras, unless they’re keeping him a secret.
What did you think of Ikaris, Emmet! I liked his arc in the film.
The film is way too long but there are things to like it. (Jolie, Deaf Speedster, The Celestials)
I like the Eternals comic but it is not incredibly popular compared to other titles.
Lots of comic readers don’t care for it at all.
It seems like it would be extremely hard to make a widely popular movie out of it.
And honestly the trailers do it no favors.
I liked the movie. Felt a little slow in spots, but it did need to introduce a lot of characters and a lot of backstory. There was enough humor to keep it from being too ponderous, and I ended up finding all the characters very compelling. The diverity of the cast emphasized the fact that the Eternals had impacted cultures all over the world. Not my favorite Marvel movie, but far from my least favorite.
Just got home from seeing it. To say it’s underwhelming is a bit of an understatement. There are some nice moments, and the visuals are great (they really nailed the speedster effects especially), but the dialogue was horrid, there was no reason to care about any but maybe three of the characters, and there were two massive infodumps that pulled me right out of the movie. I did think Gemma Chan was outstanding given the material she had to work with, and Kumail Nanjiani crushed it.
5/10, not the worst way to spend a few hours, but I doubt I’ll ever watch it again.
If Marvel could absolutely get on that 6 episode Kingo Disney+ show I would be Eternally
grateful. Just think how stylistically different that could be visually. A big budget marvel Bollywood influenced series? Talk about a breath of fresh air. This needs to happen. Also Disney needs to throw a dump truck of money at Miranda to write the Rogers musical.
@13 Kingo and his companion, and that Bollywood scene, were the most joyful part of the movie. I would love to see more of Kingo.
Still not buying that they just sat on their thumbs while Thanos was dusting half the universe. “Oh, but the big boss told us to only help when the Deviants show up”. Really? Especially when you see the Deviants aren’t really any worse than some of the allies Thanos had.
Marvel painted itself into somewhat of a corner having all these beings on Earth. What were the Avengers doing while the Eternals were fighting Deviants? What were the X-Men up to? The Fantastic Four? Inhumans? Spiderman? All sitting on their thumbs while the others did the heavy lifting?
Marvel really needed to open up the universe a bit and put all these beings on different earths from the beginning, with maybe occasional crossovers.
@15 Spider-man had a math test, and the Avengers were just a bit behind. By the time any of them heard about London, the principal combatants had already moved on. The stuff in the Mexican jungle went unnoticed by anyone, and the stuff in the Indian Ocean is probably being dealt with post film. X-Men, FF, and Inhumans technically don’t exist yet in the MCU
@15 Hmmm….actually, I totally bought why the Eternals sat it out. And we were straight up told why the Eternals/Deviants figh didn’t have the Avengers around.
Zhao obviously swing for the fences (which has its own pleasures), but it did come off to me more as a ground rule double than anything else….
Quoth Emmet: “Also, there’s an Extremely Dramatic Moment toward the end of the movie that I laughed at so raucously, the entire theater could hear me. I maintain that my reaction was correct because I’m still laughing about the moment.”
I have now seen the movie and I have absolutely no idea which moment Emmet is talking about, which is very frustrating. :laughs: Em, can you enlighten us as to which moment you’re talking about here? Confused minds want to know!
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Um, Gilgamesh built the walls Uruk, of fired brick the latest Hi-Tech of the time, not Babylon. He was a Sumerian hero way older than Babylon.
@18 – I’m assuming it involved Ikarus….
@@@@@ 18,20 I think this is correct. I spent the whole movie wondering, but when it got to that big moment I both assumed that was it (and disagreed, but that’s not important).
I’m assuming the laughable moment (open to question) is Spite’s decision to go with Icarus because she has the hots for him. Neil Gaiman (I think it was his run) dealt with this potentially thorny issue by having Sprite (as a male) enchant the other Eternals into thinking they were human (?), so he could grow older and get laid. It’s hard being thousands of years old, yet in the body of a child. In the movie, she uses illusion magic to appear in her twenties.
I thought it was… fine? I didn’t like the massive infodump of names and roles we got right at the beginning, I thought there were too many characters and we didn’t get enough time with most of them. Ikarus’s main personality trait being ‘lacking a personality’ was definitely a choice. It means I in no way bought the relationship between him and Sersi.
The film was both too long and yet not long enough. I saw someone suggest that it should possbly have been a 6 hour Disney+ series, and that would have allowed us to get more invested in each of them before the main plot kicked off. I see why you can’t do that for a film you’re selling to people who haven’t done the homework beforehand, but still.
The thing that got me most was the ultimate conceit of the film, the ‘decision’ that they were supposed to all make at the end, and I just… don’t get it. Why didn’t giant-head-not-Galactus from the opening text not just recall them after they reported all the Deviants had been destroyed? What was the point of leaving them on Earth for 500 years? There’s more to it, but I can’t go into it without spoilers. But still. WHY NOT JUST RECALL THEM? Problem pre-emptively solved.
No one is pointing out that Sersi is supposed to be Circe? As in magic lady who can transform stuff (like people into pigs)?
It was an ok way to pass the time, but yeah it wasn’t a great movie because lots and lots of plot holes. And because they introduce a nice guy 2mins into the movie and then you’re supposed to care about Sersi/Ikaris when nice guy is heaps better? I think it’s tricky to do a movie with so many individual stories, prob can be done well, but didn’t really click this time. I am curious as to what nice guy’s odd family history turns out to be.
@CARLA; I wouldn’t call them plot holes. In this particular case, these characters are around for 7,000 years. And there are ten of them. No way that can be explored in a single movie. Some comments say it should have been a series on streaming and it’s hard to argue with that.
I think it was a good movie; it will take some time for it to settle, with perhaps a rewatch. It doesn’t deserve the negativity it’s receiving. As has happened with other recent Marvel projects (like Loki), some viewers, and certainly some critics, get tripped up by their own expectations. With critics, it’s less forgivable: “This movie, or series, is bad because it didn’t meet my expectations!” Well, no, because you should have independent, professional criteria for judging a movie/series on its own merits.
Sersi as Circe was referred to more than once in the film, as when Dane was asking if she’d turn him into a giraffe. If you really want to know who Dane Whitman and his family history are, a quick check on the web will tell you. The Ebony Blade is a clue; as is another Blade who asks him if he’s ready for what comes next.
One thing this movie satisfied for me was finally getting a sense of cosmic scale from the Celestials. I couldn’t help thinking of the laughable ending to the Fantastic Four/Silver Surfer movie: After ponderously setting up the arrival of Galactus, all we get to see is a space cloud and a horned shadow on the moon.
I don’t think the reasons for not fighting Thanos makes sense. Knowing the importance of a critical mass of intelligent life to the Celestials (trying to avoid spoilers) having half of it erased seems like a serious setback.
I enjoyed the original Eternals immensely. That and Kamandi were the only really memorable Kirby comics after DC axed the New Gods stuff.
I liked the movie, despite its flaws.
Avengers was a great movie in part because of the lead-in movies. Sure, we didn’t get a movie for everyone, but we got enough backstory that Avengers didn’t come out of left field. Here, the movie provided its own backstory and did it poorly (because, hey, it’s just a single movie, not a few movies).
I can’t help but think this is a building movie for this next phase, with most of the these heroes not appearing, so Marvel didn’t want to waste time building them, knowing full well that if any of them break out into potential money-making popularity they can just pull a Black Widow with them and make an ex-post-facto movie.
I guess, too me, the whole thing seems half-assed in a way that tells me this isn’t important. Thor 2 wasn’t the best movie, but it’s storyline wasn’t half-assed.
I thoroughly enjoyed the movie. It’s the first time the heroes in a Marvel movie didn’t act like adolescents, and were given messy lives, different motivations, and dark secrets. A breath of fresh air. (Ruined in some deep way by the introduction of Eros at the end, but that’s show business.)
For the overall franchise, the movie needed to introduce the Celestial cosmology to the MU, and did that well. We begin to see how this and all the previous references to Celestials piece together. It is a big idea that has never been given its due in the comics. And it’s very interesting that movie changes their modus operandi, giving it a murkier moral path.
This whole phase of the MCU, is much more interested with the gray areas of their characters. The journey of Shang-chi’s father; the revelations about the origin and purpose of the Eternals (and their reaction); are more in keeping with the conflicts of Jessica Jones, than the brightness Spider-man. And that’s just delightful.
For those who haven’t seen it, take a chance. I think it’s definitely worth it.
The worst MCU film for me. It had so much potential, with plenty of interesting characters and ideas, and it looks gorgeous. But it’s trying to do waaaay too much to do any of it well. Too many characters, too much exposition, too many bad lines, too long.
I did particularly like Kingo and Richard Madden’s performance as Ikaris – there was always something a little off about him. Heck, I liked all of the Eternals – they just didn’t give any of them enough time.
Emmet, was your laugh-out-loud moment the Pinocchio scene? That was dreadful.
@30/Greyshade: What is the Pinocchio scene?
I’m guessing Emmet’s laugh out loud moment is when the remaining Eternals on Earth get pulled into space by Arishem? I didn’t laugh but thought it did end the movie on a bit of a downer note.
The scene that really did pull me out of the movie was the mid-credits scene where we’re introduced to Harry Styles as a superhero (from what I’m told, it’s Thanos’ brother). I felt like I was watching a skit on Saturday Night Live. I now fully expect Taylor Swift and Ariana Grande and BTS to be in the cast of the rebooted X-Men.
I mean.. Ariana Grande can act so that wouldn’t be too terrible… but it’s been a LONG time since I watched Sam & Cat
@Greyshade: Pinocchio? Or is it Peter Pan and Tinkerbell?
I thought Peter Pan and Tinkerbell scene was sweet. Nothing dreadful or embarrassingly funny about it.
@33. garreth: agreed. It was far more tastefully done than what Gaiman did in the comics, where Sprite in male form was pining for Sersi, who had slept with all of the other straight males (think it was 60 of them), but would not sleep with Sprite because he “was a child.”
Yeah, the Eternals are weird concepts and Gaiman went full on weirder with them.
Any Malazan readers out there? Had a small lightbulb turn on this morning (a fridgelight, maybe). Thena and Gilgamesh have the same dynamic as Icarium and Mappo: the memory loss and battle rage over a long span of time.