Eternals
Year: 2021
Director: Cloe Zhao
Starring: Gemma Chan, Salma Hayek, Lea McHugh, Angelina Jolie, Barry Keoghan, Don Lee, Richard Madden, Kumail Nanjiani, Lauren Ridloff & Brian Tyree Henry
Runtime: 157 mins
BBFC: 12
Published: 09/11/21
Director: Cloe Zhao
Starring: Gemma Chan, Salma Hayek, Lea McHugh, Angelina Jolie, Barry Keoghan, Don Lee, Richard Madden, Kumail Nanjiani, Lauren Ridloff & Brian Tyree Henry
Runtime: 157 mins
BBFC: 12
Published: 09/11/21
So far, I have been underwhelmed with Marvel’s output regarding Phase Four of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The Disney+ series have been very mixed in quality with some bad, some good, and some great, whilst the last two films which kicked off the phase on the big screen, Black Widow & Shang-Chi, were both very disappointing to me. Like most people going into Eternals, I know nothing about the comics, the characters, or even the premise of the film. So, I was looking forward to something totally fresh, a new set of heroes to be introduced to and see how ancient beings have been living on a world now populated by superheroes. Unfortunately, Eternals bites off more than it can chew and provides little for you to truly sink your teeth into.
In the year 5000 B.C. ten superpowered ‘Eternals’ are sent by Arishem (David Kaye), a Celestial responsible for creating galaxies, to Earth to destroy Deviants, creatures that consume apex predators for their own evolutionary gain.
By the year 1500 A.D. all the Deviants have been killed, but rifts form among the group of Eternals causing them to go their own separate ways whilst they wait for Arishem to call them back to the stars.
Following the return of half the planet’s population after the defeat of Thanos, the Deviants return more powerful than ever. Now placed in charge of the Eternals, Sersi (Gemma Chan) must reunite her former allies to battle against the rising Deviant forces and uncover an extinction level event millennia in the making.
In the year 5000 B.C. ten superpowered ‘Eternals’ are sent by Arishem (David Kaye), a Celestial responsible for creating galaxies, to Earth to destroy Deviants, creatures that consume apex predators for their own evolutionary gain.
By the year 1500 A.D. all the Deviants have been killed, but rifts form among the group of Eternals causing them to go their own separate ways whilst they wait for Arishem to call them back to the stars.
Following the return of half the planet’s population after the defeat of Thanos, the Deviants return more powerful than ever. Now placed in charge of the Eternals, Sersi (Gemma Chan) must reunite her former allies to battle against the rising Deviant forces and uncover an extinction level event millennia in the making.
Eternals has been getting review bombed for having a culturally diverse cast and representing LGBTQ+ views better than any MCU has done before, and these are by far the best aspects of the entire production. The reason I dislike Eternals is a long story, so buckle up folks because we’re going to be here a while.
It’s never a good sign for the first few seconds of a film to immediately make you realise you’re going to be in for a bumpy ride. Eternals opens with a block of scrolling text that is extremely dense with information that isn't well communicated to the viewer, and it moves so fast that you can’t properly digest what it even says. You’d think Disney would be the masters of scrolling text at this point with Star Wars now under their belt, but unfortunately Eternals just throws a paragraph of jargon at you with no way for audiences to consolidate those words into coherent thoughts unless you have prior knowledge of the comics.
From here you’re treated to close to three hours of non-chronological time hopping over thousands of years as the film desperately tries to cram in multiple films worth of character development and worldbuilding into a single film. Imagine Avengers Assemble being the first MCU film rather than the culmination of five previous films…that’s Eternals. If anything, it felt closer to Joss Whedon’s Justice League than a Marvel film because of how it just dumps a group of super powered individuals together (which we know very little about) and then pits them against a cosmic force far greater than we can comprehend with little explanation as to what’s actually happening.
As I mentioned earlier, the characters are the best part of Eternals…but what makes this a negative point is that every single character, without exception, is underdeveloped. I left this film not remembering half the characters names, and a lot of them I don’t really know what their power was. Every single one of them had a really interesting backstory that was cut down and condensed to fit into a five-minute introductory scene and then never addressed again. The Eternals as a team is simply too large for one film without having been introduced to them earlier, in all you have the previously mentioned Sersi, as well as Ikaris (Richard Madden), Thena (Angelina Jolie), Ajak (Salma Hayek), Kingo (Kumail Ninjiani), Sprite (Lia McHugh), Phastos (Brian Tyree Henry), Makkari (Lauren Ridloff), Druig (Barry Keoghan), and Gilgamesh (Don Lee). That’s ten characters! Add to this you’ve got various supporting characters, some of whom are quite important to the story such as Kingo’s manager Karun (Hish Patel), and Sersi’s boyfriend Dane Whitman (Kit Harrington) which get just as much screen time as most of our heroes. The first time that Marvel even attempted a roster as stacked as this was Captain America: Civil War, where almost every single character in it had appeared in at least one prior film; those that hadn’t (like Black Panther and Spider-Man) were given time to be introduced properly too.
I wanted to know more about Sersi & Ikaris’ relationship, I loved spending time with Phastos’ family, I was invested in Sprite’s desire to grow old, Thena’s dementia style memory issues often tugged at my heartstrings…but these moments were fleeting and almost all of them went nowhere. Eternals would have been vastly improved if it focused on just one or two of these characters with the rest existing on the periphery, or not being included at all in this film.
You then have the villain issue, or the fact that the film doesn’t really have one clear one. There’s technically three, but none of them are villains in the traditional sense, and they all just have conflicting viewpoints to those of the Eternals. I wanted more depth to these moral grey areas, but instead it’s made out like the Eternal’s views on the matter is the only morally justifiable one and that makes everybody else evil, which just isn’t the case.
The sub-plot involving Deviant evolution is just kind of forgotten about too, it’s made out to be a big part of the story because one of the ‘villains’ is an evolved Deviant but this happens very close to the end of the film, and then Marvel does Marvel and just has a big fight scene to close everything off and the details of that evolution sub-plot are never addressed.
It’s never a good sign for the first few seconds of a film to immediately make you realise you’re going to be in for a bumpy ride. Eternals opens with a block of scrolling text that is extremely dense with information that isn't well communicated to the viewer, and it moves so fast that you can’t properly digest what it even says. You’d think Disney would be the masters of scrolling text at this point with Star Wars now under their belt, but unfortunately Eternals just throws a paragraph of jargon at you with no way for audiences to consolidate those words into coherent thoughts unless you have prior knowledge of the comics.
From here you’re treated to close to three hours of non-chronological time hopping over thousands of years as the film desperately tries to cram in multiple films worth of character development and worldbuilding into a single film. Imagine Avengers Assemble being the first MCU film rather than the culmination of five previous films…that’s Eternals. If anything, it felt closer to Joss Whedon’s Justice League than a Marvel film because of how it just dumps a group of super powered individuals together (which we know very little about) and then pits them against a cosmic force far greater than we can comprehend with little explanation as to what’s actually happening.
As I mentioned earlier, the characters are the best part of Eternals…but what makes this a negative point is that every single character, without exception, is underdeveloped. I left this film not remembering half the characters names, and a lot of them I don’t really know what their power was. Every single one of them had a really interesting backstory that was cut down and condensed to fit into a five-minute introductory scene and then never addressed again. The Eternals as a team is simply too large for one film without having been introduced to them earlier, in all you have the previously mentioned Sersi, as well as Ikaris (Richard Madden), Thena (Angelina Jolie), Ajak (Salma Hayek), Kingo (Kumail Ninjiani), Sprite (Lia McHugh), Phastos (Brian Tyree Henry), Makkari (Lauren Ridloff), Druig (Barry Keoghan), and Gilgamesh (Don Lee). That’s ten characters! Add to this you’ve got various supporting characters, some of whom are quite important to the story such as Kingo’s manager Karun (Hish Patel), and Sersi’s boyfriend Dane Whitman (Kit Harrington) which get just as much screen time as most of our heroes. The first time that Marvel even attempted a roster as stacked as this was Captain America: Civil War, where almost every single character in it had appeared in at least one prior film; those that hadn’t (like Black Panther and Spider-Man) were given time to be introduced properly too.
I wanted to know more about Sersi & Ikaris’ relationship, I loved spending time with Phastos’ family, I was invested in Sprite’s desire to grow old, Thena’s dementia style memory issues often tugged at my heartstrings…but these moments were fleeting and almost all of them went nowhere. Eternals would have been vastly improved if it focused on just one or two of these characters with the rest existing on the periphery, or not being included at all in this film.
You then have the villain issue, or the fact that the film doesn’t really have one clear one. There’s technically three, but none of them are villains in the traditional sense, and they all just have conflicting viewpoints to those of the Eternals. I wanted more depth to these moral grey areas, but instead it’s made out like the Eternal’s views on the matter is the only morally justifiable one and that makes everybody else evil, which just isn’t the case.
The sub-plot involving Deviant evolution is just kind of forgotten about too, it’s made out to be a big part of the story because one of the ‘villains’ is an evolved Deviant but this happens very close to the end of the film, and then Marvel does Marvel and just has a big fight scene to close everything off and the details of that evolution sub-plot are never addressed.
For such a stacked A-List cast you would expect Eternals to deliver some great performances. But even they can be a bit underwhelming at times. Kumail Ninjiani and Brian Tyree Henry are the standout performers in the Eternals ensemble, and Gemma Chan and Richard Madden both have some great moments…but often I found that these potentially great performances were bogged down by an exposition heavy script that bled all emotion dry from what was happening on screen.
Then there’s the puzzling composition of the film with its refusal to stick to an aspect ratio for more than a few seconds, and the horrendous pacing. For a film that clocks in at two hours and thirty-seven minutes, Eternals feels like it could compete against The Return of the King’s Extended Edition for how long it feels like the film lasts. After just an hour I was checking my watch to see how much longer was left, thinking that I had been watching the film for close to two hours at that point. Compare this to the recently released and similar in length Dune, which is also exposition heavy, and Dune felt like a smooth and seamless journey that was a pleasure to sit through, Eternals however had me leaving to go to the loo around the midway point mostly because I just wanted to get up and stretch my legs. Once I came back a few minutes later I had missed absolutely nothing of importance apparently, whatever it was I missed I didn’t notice its exclusion and the people I went to see the film with weren’t even sure what had happened whilst I had been away…seemingly staring at the screen with eyes glazed over thinking about being anywhere else.
Briefly going back to the aspect ratio. I saw Eternals in IMAX and the amount of times shots changed from IMAX standard and back again in a single scene was headache inducing. As well as this some scenes didn’t even make sense for the IMAX resolution and made them weird (like the widely publicised sex scene that was shot in IMAX despite everything either side of the intercourse itself not being IMAX resolution).
The special effects are a bit inconsistent too with stuff like the Deviants looking rubbery, but scenes like the conversations with Arishem look incredible. Whilst that’s a fairly small issue in the grand scheme of things, it’s just the cherry on top of a whole heap of problems that Eternals has with the way it’s been put together.
Eternals is the worst MCU film since Thor: The Dark World and continues the trend of underwhelming Phase Four films. It is without a doubt in my bottom five in the series and the only way I can see it being salvaged is if future MCU projects or direct sequels salvage the good ideas this film had going for it. It’s also the second time this year that director Cloe Zhao has delivered a film that bored me to tears and I have to start wondering what all the hype surrounding her really is. Whilst Eternals definitely takes steps in the right direction for diversity and inclusivity in mainstream cinema, it’s a shame that the package that comes delivered in is so devoid of any character and soul to allow that diversity to flourish.
Then there’s the puzzling composition of the film with its refusal to stick to an aspect ratio for more than a few seconds, and the horrendous pacing. For a film that clocks in at two hours and thirty-seven minutes, Eternals feels like it could compete against The Return of the King’s Extended Edition for how long it feels like the film lasts. After just an hour I was checking my watch to see how much longer was left, thinking that I had been watching the film for close to two hours at that point. Compare this to the recently released and similar in length Dune, which is also exposition heavy, and Dune felt like a smooth and seamless journey that was a pleasure to sit through, Eternals however had me leaving to go to the loo around the midway point mostly because I just wanted to get up and stretch my legs. Once I came back a few minutes later I had missed absolutely nothing of importance apparently, whatever it was I missed I didn’t notice its exclusion and the people I went to see the film with weren’t even sure what had happened whilst I had been away…seemingly staring at the screen with eyes glazed over thinking about being anywhere else.
Briefly going back to the aspect ratio. I saw Eternals in IMAX and the amount of times shots changed from IMAX standard and back again in a single scene was headache inducing. As well as this some scenes didn’t even make sense for the IMAX resolution and made them weird (like the widely publicised sex scene that was shot in IMAX despite everything either side of the intercourse itself not being IMAX resolution).
The special effects are a bit inconsistent too with stuff like the Deviants looking rubbery, but scenes like the conversations with Arishem look incredible. Whilst that’s a fairly small issue in the grand scheme of things, it’s just the cherry on top of a whole heap of problems that Eternals has with the way it’s been put together.
Eternals is the worst MCU film since Thor: The Dark World and continues the trend of underwhelming Phase Four films. It is without a doubt in my bottom five in the series and the only way I can see it being salvaged is if future MCU projects or direct sequels salvage the good ideas this film had going for it. It’s also the second time this year that director Cloe Zhao has delivered a film that bored me to tears and I have to start wondering what all the hype surrounding her really is. Whilst Eternals definitely takes steps in the right direction for diversity and inclusivity in mainstream cinema, it’s a shame that the package that comes delivered in is so devoid of any character and soul to allow that diversity to flourish.