Talking at Length about The Eternals

So, it’s been long enough and I need to start talking about The Eternals (This is a pun. I'm doing a- okay, let's move on).

I love the Dorito ship, I just think it's neat.

One of the first movies I wrote about on this site was Captain Marvel. Captain Marvel was a movie that got a lot of backlash for really dumb reasons; certain groups of people were mad at Brie Larson and decried her performance and her movie as dull and lifeless but, that wasn’t true! It was actually a really fun and interesting performance! I liked Captain Marvel for a variety of reasons and thought it was a particularly neat exploration of a woman rising out of a cycle of abuse, and so I championed it for those reasons – but, it was admittedly a very mixed movie, even with all of that. It was a movie that felt like it had a lot of neat character ideas in it, and was from a director team who (from what I understand) were indie directors mostly interested in exploring characters than in exciting Blockbuster action. But, having to conform to the Marvel brand, we see a lot of that good character potential wasted away to action that fully doesn’t land, and a plot maybe too convoluted for its britches.

Anyways, that’s my Eternals review-

Gemma Chan's Sersi, a very charismatic and cool protagonist who is also extremely passive 90% of the time.

I’ve taken a long time to actually approach this because the more I think about it, the more I’m kind of on the other side of the line than I did with Captain Marvel. Which, to be absolutely clear, isn’t me saying I “hated” the movie for all the silly dumb reasons that some people are hating this movie. What I mean is that where Captain Marvel is a movie I think of as “messy, but good!” I think Eternals might be more “heartfelt, but messy!” In the theatre I spent the majority of the run-time thinking “hey, you know, I actually kind of like this!” But where Captain Marvel ended with a strong feeling of catharsis and thematic clarity, as Carol Danvers rises against the forces that oppressed her and refusal to be silenced, Eternals’ third act is so thematically muddled. I don’t know what it is about Marvel’s Phase 4, but they’ve really been struggling to stick the landing. Wandavision and Falcon and the Winter Soldier both had a lot of acclaim but had really… weird? Conclusions? Conclusions that worked but felt like they were on some level a hollow resolution to each show’s core themes. Loki was better, I think, but mostly because I was awed that a Marvel show would have the gall to depict Genesis 3 on a cosmic scale as the end of their fun Disney+ show like that. There were still a lot of complaints that it was an ending that served more as set-up than resolution. I’ve already talked in my previous MCU articles this year about how Black Widow and Shang-Chi had a lot of good in them only to be foiled by weaker third acts. Now, Eternals is sort of the culmination of that problem. It only makes me more nervous for what No Way Home will bring to the table.

But I’m burying the lede, and I want to talk about this movie at least a little without spoiling it. So, what did I like about The Eternals?

I love Sprite's joy of storytelling and the way it impacts Kingo and the ancient civilizations, but it feels bizarre that it never comes into the present? That seems like the sort of thing I would tie in.

A lot! I really wanted this movie to be a weird, experimental exercise for the MCU, and the first half definitely felt like it was delivering. Director Chloe Zhao’s involvement in this project has been largely advertised through her recent Oscar win, promising that this would be a “prestige” MCU entry. There are aspects where it feels a lot more intentional in its cinematography and framing than most other MCU flicks I can think of. A lot of this movie is just really pretty and nice to look at. It’s kind of sad that occasionally being intentionally pretty and well-framed feels like a new threshold for these movies, but it’s one that I appreciate and feel needs to be stressed. Moreover, this movie is making choices. It opens with a title crawl a la Blade Runner or Star Wars? It introduces a cast of ten titular Eternals, and tries to give basically all of them defined wants and needs and goals? It trusts the audience to follow it as it zips backward in time to follow these Eternals over thousands of years? Eternals has some guts to it, some real ambition, and I can’t help loving it for that. It’s a movie that swings for the fences, and when it hits, it really hits.

Don Lee basically plays his character from Train to Busan, and that is a Good Thing.

My biggest surprise through the first half was just how different all of these characters feel. It would be easy to cast ten characters with a stylistically similar power set and make them feel like variations on a theme, especially with only so much time to develop them. But this cast feels surprisingly distinct! For one, everyone’s abilities feel unique and varied. “Okay, this guy is ranged, this guy is the engineer, this one does illusions.” And they all feel like they have different relationships with humanity, and different interests going on. More than that, their complex dynamic with each other largely works. They feel like a group of people who have been around with each other for a long time, who have understandings and misunderstandings about each other. For the most part, the emotionality of those relationships land really genuinely. As we are introduced to the characters throughout the first half, it feels we’re doing a lot of interesting setup for potential thematic depth. A lot of these people are, in some way, wrestling with purpose. They serve a cosmic god-like entity named Arishem who created them and sent them to Earth, and now after thousands of years of silence they’re left wondering why they are there, why they were made, and why were they made in this way? One of them is struggling with what could be read as mental illness, written into the core of who she is. One of them feels out of place in society, wondering why she couldn’t look different. There’s a lot of deep questions and rich potential going on. Which only makes it more frustrating that the second half continually squanders it.

I could write another essay about Kingo. I love Kumail, I think he's great in this movie. But also, why is Kingo in this movie?

To render it spoil-less, there are about three reasons the back half of The Eternals slowly falls apart. First, is the high-concept nature of the movie means a lot of the relationships and arcs of this cast are left explained rather than shown. In a way, I’m reminded of Rise of Skywalker and the way it often mistook “lore” for development. Sure, Poe used to be a spice trader, I guess, but that doesn’t actually impact our understanding of him or his actions. The performances in The Eternals are generally good enough that the movie gets away with it in the movie, but there are core aspects that don’t really hold up to scrutiny. Like, we’re told early on that Ikaris (Richard Madden) and Cerci (Gemma Chan) fell in love thousands of years ago and then had a break-up that seems to have dramatically affected both of their trajectories. Cool! But despite all the build-up, and the way that we hop along the chronology, we never see this break-up. It’s never shown to us. Moreover, we don’t even really have a concrete reason why it happened, which feels like it would be a crucial part in understanding Ikaris’ character. This sort of thing continues throughout the movie, a consequence of being the sort of story where we’re still introducing characters 100 minutes in. Characters like Phastos are given three scenes at most in order to explain their whole deal and, yeah! It doesn’t really work! These characters do feel distinct and they do have a life to them, but that life is so necessarily bareboned to fit in the runtime. Their “arcs” are built on piecing together various facts we learn across the timeline rather than actually seeing them change or make decisions. We will learn that one character loves another, but never really find out why or get to see those two characters interacting. It works during the runtime, but feels stilted upon reflection.

Someone pointed out to me that Marvel has introduced a lot of cosmic celestial god-figures at one and, yeah! Why did they do that? That's weird!

It really feels like, at the end of the day, there are just too many people in this movie. While I genuinely like all of this cast and Zhao’s directing does a good job at making me feel invested in all of them, there’s simply too much going on to adequately develop everyone. Some characters are written in and out of crucial moments seemingly for the sole moment of thinning out the cast for that scene. There are also multiple antagonists that are being held in delicate balance against each other, each with different goals and motivations. Even separate from all the character stuff, there’s a lot of “plot” going on. There are multiple points where the movie has to stop in order to explain the Celestials, and what they want with Earth or with the Eternals. The need to explain isn’t bad in and of itself, after all, I loved Dune and it has a lot of world-building it needs to set up. But the lore of The Eternals is constantly in flux. We’re always learning new things that shift our expectations, constantly having to accommodate for new information. The climax sets up two or three different plans from our heroes, and each has different rules and moving parts. More than that, I suspect at least one of them was added in reshoots – in fact, I think a lot of this movie was shifted around in the edit. There’s an interview from September where Dan Stevens suggested he would be playing Kro, the leader of the villainous Deviants. But, in the movie proper, Kro is voiced by Bill Skarsgård. What exactly happened behind the scenes with this movie?

Jolie is both really good in this movie and weirdly underutilized. Her character is super neat and then her arc just kind of ends.

Between the reliance on telling rather than showing, and the increasing number of things going on in the film, the back half of the movies falls increasingly into a failure to bring proper audience catharsis. We are told new things about characters and their relationships, but because we didn’t fully understand these characters to begin with, it’s hard to fully grasp how they are changing and what each revelation means. I like these characters and I think that they are played well, but it becomes increasingly clear that I don’t really know a lot about them. Sersi is cool, and loves humanity, and wants to see them flourish – which is a great basis for a character in this movie. But as more and more important choices are thrust upon her, we stop understanding why she’s doing things or what her motivation is, because we’ve been so focused on introducing new people rather than fully exploring who she is. The arcs that started with such depth and promise end up feeling shallow and half-hearted. The ending of The Eternals falls even harder into “third-act shenanigans” than Shang-Chi did, leaving with a truly baffling conclusion that doesn’t feel very resolved at all.

Billy Keoghan supremacy. I watched this on the same day as The Killing of a Sacred Deer, and this man is going to go far. Druig is easily the most complex and interesting guy in this cast.

While I truly enjoyed The Eternals, and I really do love a lot of what it was aiming to do, the more that I think about the final product the more it feels like it missed the mark. I would hardly call it the worst MCU movie, it has too much genuine heart and too much ambition to do that. Eternals is not just a corporate cheque. But, at the end of the day, I simply think it was doing too much. It could have cut out a character or two, or found a simpler story to tell. Despite the marketing, it's not really "prestige" MCU, but it's also not typically crowd-pleasing either. I’m genuinely here for the first half, and I hope a lot of these characters get the chance to find proper development. Most of these actors are doing really good work, especially my guy Billy Keoghan. I honestly don’t think it’s bad, and I don’t think it deserves the reputation it is getting. But it is a very messy movie, with stakes that exceed its runtime. And that’s all just my read of it, I think a lot of more casual audiences are enjoying this one, and good for them. If you’ve been on the fence about seeing The Eternals, I genuinely suggest you give it a shot, because I think there’s a lot to like. Seeing these movies in a theatre packed full of people eager for the next MCU outing will always be a fun time. I just think, despite the name and the impressive runtime, there’s not a lot of longevity here. It's possible that despite it's bold ambitions, The Eternals flies a little too close to the sun.

This is a pretty movie when it wants to be! More Marvel movies should decide to be pretty!

But it's okay, because I'm sure the next movie, No Way Home, will be much less cluttered when it has six villains and three different Spider-Men at play-