Marvel fans everywhere were excited for the newest movie in the Marvel Cinematic Universe – Eternals, and many agreed that the film delivered. But after watching it last weekend, I felt an overwhelming taste of bleh, like eating a toast sandwich.
The Eternals are aliens from other worlds sent to earth and other planets to protect sentient life from creatures called Deviants. The team destroys the last of the deviants on earth and then splits up. Hundreds of years later Sersi (Gemma Chan) and Sprite (Lia McHogh), two of the Eternals, are attacked by a deviant in London. They are saved by another Eternal, Ikaris (Richard Madden), and try to reunite the group to fight off the resurgent deviants. This starts the three’s quest to find the rest of the Eternals. After finding more and more of their fellow Eternals they learn about the reason for their creation. They learn that they were built to farm sentient life and to create the conditions for creatures called Celestials to be born. They find that there is one inside of Earth. Will they follow their purpose or will they fight against it to save the world?
Eternals is Oscar-winning director Chloe Zhao’s fourth feature film and her debut Marvel Film. The movie also has a star-studded cast, with Kumail Nanjiani (playing Kingo), Brian Tyree Henry (Phastos), and Don Lee (Gligamesh), Barry Keoghan (Druig), Harish Patel (Karun). It also stars Marvel’s first deaf actor in Lauren Ridloff who portrays the similarly deaf heroine Makkari.
Zhao, Patrick Burleigh, and Ryan Firpo did their best in the writer’s room but created many problems. The main qualm with the movie is that it tells without showing. The exposition starts off poorly with a text entry without the need for what could have easily been said or at least implied within the text. Throughout the story the background information is lackluster and without understanding through the text. Halfway through the movie, The characters stop referring to the Being in the planet as the Celestial and start referring to it as Tiamat. This change was so confusing that viewers wouldn’t have known who they were talking about until almost the end of the story. Either not changing the name or explaining why the name change was needed earlier on and would have eliminated most of the confusion leding to a better second half.
There was a supreme lack of character arc and story for most of the cast. The few character arcs that did occur were so underdeveloped that their ending became strange. A prime example of this is the character Sprite. At the beginning of the film, she sets up her desire to be human, yet she doesn’t talk about it again nearly at all throughout the story. In fact, most of her character development is stated by other characters. This failure to develop key characters made it so it was hard to care about the story.
The Eternals is not the worst Marvel movie, but it is up there with the worst of the Disney-owned years. The movie itself was rather bland with a rather overdone twist antagonist and an underdeveloped secondary antagonist that I personally found more compelling.
The character arc of those who got arcs was fine if not middling. The character arc of Sersi and Ikaris was implemented correctly and was received well. The product on the whole was created well enough. The sets were good and the costumes were created perfectly. The audience was never taken out of the experience but overall the story would have been better created as a serialized TV show or short mini-series. The movie almost just seemed smashed together to make it short enough to fit within the two-hour and thirty-seven-minute run time. 5/10 I would want to eat my sandwich with some cheddar instead.
