Eternals (Review)
Eternals Fails to Become the Epic It Desperately Wants to Be
The MCU has flown too close to the sun for too long, and with Eternals, its metaphorical wings have finally melted. Despite doing so well building its shared universe by slowly introducing new characters through pre-established ones, Eternals has the audacity to introduce a team of ten new characters, a slew of minor ones, and, I suppose, the Marvel equivalent of an elder god without so much as a heads up in another movie. Eternals is a bloated and blunt mess that spreads itself too thin despite a monstrous run-time clocking in at over two-and-a-half hours. Despite that, I have nothing but respect for Eternals featuring so many LGBTQ BIOPIC characters and actors in the cast. To be honest, it felt right seeing the diversity on a team that’s even bigger than The Avengers.
Eternals basically pretends the past twenty-some-odd movies in the MCU don’t matter in the slightest. There is a passing mention of the events from Infinity War and Endgame, but no heroes or villains from the MCU appear. This approach creates the first two strikes against Eternals; the first being that the film exists within a void in the MCU yet insists on impacting the events in phase four and beyond, and the second being that Eternals simply doesn’t feel like a superhero movie. It could be argued that it’s deconstructing genre tropes by paying homage to the epic legends of the past, such as (Gilgamesh, Beowulf, etc) through its narrative structure, but that’s weak sauce. For one thing, those were essentially the original superheroes, and (with all due respect) just because those stories did it first, doesn’t mean they did it better. That would be like arguing that an 1885 Benz Patent-Motorwagen is superior to any other car made since. This meandering hero’s journey approach to the storytelling might have worked, except for one important detail: those tales followed one hero through their adventure. Eternals features ten “heroes” and basically ends with “tune in next time to see what happens.”
There’s so much going on in Eternals that it’s difficult to come up with a quick and simple synopsis of events, especially because the script by director Chloé Zhao and writers Patrick Burleigh, Ryan Firpo, and Kaz Firpo is filled with contradictions and logical dead ends. Before I get to all that, I should explain what an Eternal is. From what I can tell, an Eternal is a being created by Celestial Arishem (the MCU’s version of an elder god) to hunt down and kill monsters known as deviants hiding on planets across the universe. The team of Eternals the film follows is sent to Earth and ordered not to interfere with the events of man, except they do constantly but then insist they stay out of everything. They make relatively quick work of the deviants and then sit around doing pretty much nothing for hundreds and hundreds of years. That is until a new deviant appears and forces them to reunite in order to face their strongest foe yet. Their globe-trotting adventure reveals the grim truth behind their existence and the deviants they’re forced to battle and leads to the fate of humanity resting in their hands. It certainly sounds exciting, and there are genuinely spectacular sequences, but by the end of the film, I couldn’t care less about these new heroes.
Don’t misunderstand, there are a lot of characters I loved in the film. Then again, when you’ve got ten protagonists, odds are that a couple will actually be good. Let’s start by shaming the weaker characters in the film, who were played by Richard Madden, Salma Hayek, and Kit Harrington (who wasn’t technically one of the team.) These are all characters defined by their purpose, rather than who they are and are insufferably bland archetypes. Luckily, they don’t get a chance to drag the film down too much, thanks to Don Lee, Brian Tyree Henry, Barry Keoghan, and Lauren Ridloff, who are exceptionally well-crafted characters backed by genuine, charming performances. I also want to give a big shout-out to Harish Patel and Kumail Nanjiani, who provided 75% of the comic relief. Then you have Gemma Chan, Lia McHugh, and Angelina Jolie, who give the best they can with poorly written characters. I didn’t dislike any of these female leads, but even during their more dramatic moments, I found myself wishing I was watching the fun characters instead. In that regard, Eternals manages to balance the good with the bad to create, well, “meh”.
To address the major flaws in Eternals I will have to include some spoilers, but I’ll keep the big ones as vague as possible. My biggest pet peeve is that every single one of the Eternals is an absolute idiot. The revelations that rock their identities to the core aren’t really revelations at all. The existential crisis they face at the idea they were “created” isn’t a contradiction to anything they say at any point in the film. Characters freely admit they were created by Arishem from the very beginning, but act like it’s a huge betrayal when they learn they are essentially homunculi. Another logical loophole is that Ridloff’s character is deaf, but can sense vibrations in the air around her to the degree that she can perceive what people are saying. This “sensitivity” negates any potential obstacle her character might have had to overcome due to her handicap, which is just boring and makes her the token deaf teammate. Then there’s the notion that not a single one of them thought to question their orders for thousands of years. In my book, that makes the Eternals the same as fanatical zealots or even Nazis, both of which I can’t stand. If they were artificial beings only recently created, I could see them struggling with morality and ethics, but they are immortals who have been living among humans since the dawn of civilization. There’s no excuse for them being this level of “basic.” The number of poorly thought-through details in Eternals is distracting enough to take away from the spectacle.
While I can’t say that Eternals is the worst movie in the MCU (looking at you Thor and Iron Man 2), it’s definitely a fall from grace for the studio. However, it’s easily the worst of phase four and makes me question if Marvel is beginning to compromise quality for quantity. I never thought I would say this, but even taking into account the pandemic, four new movies in a year is too much. My biggest concern is that Marvel is refusing to learn from past mistakes, especially when it comes to the villain problem they’ve consistently faced when heroes are given their first “stand-alone” movies. To be fair though, I didn’t hate Eternals but found myself much more annoyed with it than I should have been. It’s a mediocre movie, which makes it better than the bad ones out there, but also one that fans should wait to watch for free on Disney+.
