Eternals — Review Thread

I loved it. I like slow sci-fi stories, like old Star Trek

This movie asks deep philosophical questions, with the landscape of the MCU

Is it my favorite MCU Film? No

But it’s not bad either

By the way Kumail Ali Nanjian stole every scene!

I’m sure if you want more over the top action

Spider-Man is waiting around the corner

::swing::whiff::

That's your review.

Multiple explanations of the same shit one after an another, that still don't make sense.

While I like they let Zhao add some touches on the landscape, it's way too long. Richard Madden, Hayak, and Jolie are laughably bad.

Bottom 5 MCU.

On the bright side, maybe Zhao can use this money to make more movies like her previous two.

5/10

A certain breed of Marvel stan seems ride or die and is building a narrative that any critics just hate that it has a diverse cast and is directed by an Asian woman. The fact that a lot of these same critics loved Nomadland doesn't seem to matter, apparently, or that Black Panther was critically acclaimed. It's also funny to see these cats argue "omg the cast is so diverse" but if you actually google "Eternals cast" the first four names that come up are white people. It's not like Marvel made The Wiz here.


Anyway, haven't seen this yet. Don't know when I'll get to it. The French Dispatch is finally playing in my city and I still need to catch up on Last Night in Soho. My horror loving girlfriend also wants to see Antlers and we might even still find time for Halloween Kills. I do really like this article on how Marvel stans weaponize "progressive" claims against critics. www.vice.com/en/article/n7nwkk/it-is-possible-for-eternals-to-be-both-diverse-and-bad

My buddy is a big Marvel fan and he found it pretty boring, though he did say it was better than Black Widow. His fiancé fell asleep lol.

French Dispatch all the way.

Seeing this on Saturday.

Eternals(11/11/2021)

In the early 90s Disney was first making its comeback via the “Disney Renaissance” and in 1991 they quickly scored a major coup: they managed to snag a Best Picture nomination for their hit Beauty and the Beast, the first animated movie to get such an honor and the only one to ever do so during the era when nominations were limited to five slots. This didn’t instantly change how Disney made its movies. Their follow-up, Aladdin wasn’t necessarily made with prestige in mind and they didn’t have Oscar gold in mind with The Lion King either, but after Beauty and the Beast won its nomination studio head Jeffrey Katzenberg did want to repeat that and decided that the next movie in the pipeline would be the one where they went for it all and that movie was… Pocahontas. Yeah, it doesn’t take an in depth knowledge of the Academy Awards of Disney to know that didn’t work out, but it was what they were trying to do and it affected that film’s production in a number of ways. I bring all this up because I think Marvel may have made a similar mistake with their latest film Eternals. Kevin Feige got his own taste of Oscar gold in 2018 when Black Panther got a Best Picture nomination and I think with Eternals he was trying to produce a film that was still in the MCU continuity but which would also feel larger than that and would in many ways be “one for the critics.” Unfortunately that seems to be a bit of a miscalculation because the critics have not liked this movie at all and have in fact given it one of the lowest RT and Metacritic scores of any MCU film and the movie’s Oscar chances look dim. Despite that, I would argue that this is no Pocahontas. That movie sucked in 1995 and has looked increasingly misbegotten ever since while Eternals actually has a lot going for it.

Eternals is primarily set during the present MCU timeline but has flashbacks going all the way back to the dawn of humankind. The titular group it follows are entities from a distant galaxy who look like humans but don’t age and have special powers and are tasked by god-like beings called celestials with going to planets and fighting off these snarling monster things called deviants that show up and attack people throughout history. These eternals believe they killed the last of the “deviants” around the 16th century and have been waiting for orders from the celestials ever since and have mostly assimilated into human society in the centuries since. Our main point of view character is Sersi (Gemma Chan), an Eternal that has the power to manipulate matter. After an earthquake she and another Eternal named Sprite (Lia McHugh), who is permanently twelve years old and can conjure illusions, spot a deviant in London. They and another Eternal that shows up, the Superman-like Ikaris (Richard Madden), fight this deviant off but can’t finish it as it seems to have a healing power these creatures never had previously. Soon they find out that this is because it had killed and drained the power from the lead Eternal Ajak (Salma Hayek) and was likely hunting for the rest of them. As such they decide to seek out the rest of their group around the world in hopes of putting an end to this situation.

Eternals was directed by Chloé Zhao, the filmmaker behind last year’s Academy Award winning Nomadland making her the first Oscar winner to direct an MCU film and this along with its rather ambitious scope have kind of raised expectations for the movie in a number of ways, perhaps unfairly. The film is not necessarily a trying to do anything unprecedented in cinema and it does still have a lot of the usual trappings of an MCU film like post-credit scenes and the like, but in terms of scope and format it does legitimately play differently. Structurally the comic book movie it most resembles is actually Watchmen in that it has a broken up team of superheroes reforming after many years to figure out what’s hunting them down while also flashing back to an alternate history in which said superheroes are changing the course of world events. The film also generally has a different tone than the other MCU films in that those films normally play out over the course of a couple of days and follow a simpler action movie format and tend to feature quipy protagonists. I suppose the A-story here also plays out over a similarly short period of time but the flashbacks to previous eras are so extensive here that it feels a lot different and while the movie is hardly humorless the characters are a bit more jaded from having seen so much misery over the course of the thousands of years they’ve walked the Earth.

Of course unlike other Marvel origin movies, with the exception of The Guardians of the Galaxy, this film needs to introduce a whole team rather than an individual superhero and there are a whole lot of them. There are upwards of ten different “Eternals” in the film each with unique powers and personalities that need to be introduced. They don’t really have equal screen time and at times it feels like the movie could have benefited from cutting a few of them. The movie also isn’t super consistent about how much these Eternals are supposed to keep their identities secret and refrain from interfering with human endeavors. The fact that they were ordered not to mettle in human events not involving the deviants is used to explain why they didn’t help in the fight against Thanos or any of the other threats that have emerged over the course of these movies, but there doesn’t seem to be a “Prime Directive” logic at play here as the Phastos character is actively advancing human technology through history. There is eventually something of an explanation for all of this but it isn’t the easiest plot twist to swallow. And speaking of those deviants, they’re not great monsters. They kind of look like a recycling of a recycling of the creature from Cloverfield and the somewhat intriguing idea that they’re stealing the Eternals’ powers ultimately kind of goes nowhere.

As an action movie Eternals has its moments but may frustrate some of Marvel’s normal fans. There isn’t really an action scene here that’s as much of a standout as something like the bus scene in Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings or the finale of Black Widow though it’s not devoid of action either and it is definitely interested in showing off visual effects to some extent. Chloé Zhao seemed like an odd choice to direct the film when she was first announced (back when she was primarily known as the director of The Rider) and this is indeed quite different from her previous movies, which were primarily known for incorporating non-actors and focusing in on the gritty realities of fringe sections of America. This… isn’t that, but it’s also probably not a coincidence that sections of the movie are set in South Dakota and she brings a certain grandeur to some of the visuals here that are missing from other MCU films. In fact in some ways this almost feels more like a DC movie than a Marvel movie, which might be part of why critics haven’t been vibing with it even though it kind of feels like it was made for them. I do get why the film might feel a bit disappointing, it certainly never quite lives up to some of the promise that a mold breaking MCU film directed by Zhao suggested but I’d also hardly call it “bad” either. It’s a movie that break’s Marvel’s usual formula and house style more than anything that’s come before, which I think is admirable, and the fact that it’s received such a cold reception bodes poorly for how the company will be received as they dig deeper into the strange pockets of their catalog.
***1/2 out of Five