I've had a time with some of the bigger releases recently and for the most part I just find them to mostly be all overlong, dull, inert or just unengaging even when the best talent and the biggest budgets are used to create worlds most of us only dreamed about seeing on the big screen even 10 years ago. Black Widow had some fun characters but was lacking much of story or any urgency. What should have been far more personal and grounded story has a very over the top yet deeply by the numbers finale you'd find in a lot of CBMs which would be fine if what lead up to it outside of the characters being affable or just entertaining at what they do was something fun, or intense or... Something. Shang Chi was fine but... It didn't sing or soar much either, despite doing some great things, like making the father not really an outright "villain". Die Another Day was laborious, again just too long and with zero emotional connection, in my opinion due to the fact that despite Craig's run being about Bond as a character, since the audience never bought into the relationship between him and Seydoux which so much hinges on in terms of Bond's character... Yeah, you didn't much care about anything else. That and it's final boss villain doesn't seem to even have an agenda that makes any sense. Dune... I'm sorry but it's breathtaking in scope, a wonder of visuals, truly a master of the camera and production at work with some of Zimmer's best musical work ever... And it's a bore. It's characters are dull, dull, dull with a lack of anything we as the viewer can latch onto or truly root for and they leave us twisting in the breeze with a fork ton of information about this world out of reach.
And now... the highly awaited big screen MCU version of The Eternals falls into all the traps the talented film makers who made the previously listed did as well.
This is a very visually textured film, maybe one of the best on those terms that Marvel Studios has ever produced. We travel the world, get a plethora of settings, historical and modern. Barring the post credit scene with... A truly cheap looking Pip The Troll alongside Thanos' brother Eros, we have some pretty good VFX and Zhao and her team know how to get those just the right angles with the perfect lighting for the vast majority of this movie. Now the set pieces I feel are spaced out to far apart and the action save for a couple of scenes isn't really that much to write home about.
But a Marvel film choosing to be more somber and at least on paper less interested in bombast and paint by numbers Marvel style is not enough. The protagonists, antagonists and plot have to grab you even when you don't quite know what's going on.
But... The plot doesn't really pass the smell test and while every person in the cast is fine performer these characters in this story do not come off well. No one has any spark and I will not let this film off the hook because wooden characterization plays into the reveal that they are... robots? Androids? Cyborgs? Whatever... No. That reveal is not an excuse as to why this entire cast is wasted by a director that seemed to be at a loss for making these characters anything outside of bullet points about what kind of "slot" in these type of films they fall into and even then that wouldn't be bad but they as characters don't really pop in any way.
Now... Let us not pretend though that a failure here is some insult to the comics version. The facts are... The Eternals have always been a hard nut to crack to make it must read Marvel. In the comics their story feels like Kirby mixed in his Asgard with storylines from his uncompleted New Gods at DC and a veneer of the Ancient Aliens theories and threw it against the wall to see what sticks. It's never had a more than a niche' following despite retroconning so many elements to become cornerstone building blocks of the Marve Universe. But... they as characters dont' have the following of the X-Men or the Fantastic Four for reasons that I don't doubt have to do with the concepts being far more interesting on paper than has ever been executed in any fashion.
And that's another area where I believe the film fails, and I hope this doesn't come off as Old Man Fanboy uncomfortable with change. As stated, I don't have much of a feel for the Eternals even as again, I like the mythology and the consequencs and implications of their existence within the Marvel U. I'm not particularly attached to the comic versions of these chartacters but for a lot of these characters shaping them and the Celestial origin for the MCU closer to the books would have immediatley been a net positive for a lot of the cast and the film as a whole.
Gemma Chan is Sersi here and... I'm sorry she's flat. She has chemistry with Kit Harington's Dane Whitman and I'll say... They made me want to see the Black Knight and Sersi joining the Avengers at some point. But once they separate Sersi loses all personality outside of the going through the motions required to say lines and wait for the clapboard to tell you to stop. Well, it didn't have to be that way. Sersi is a sensualist, a hedonist even. She is immortal and beautiful and while she's not callous towards humanity and is a true hero she's still not what most would consider "leader" material and that is GREAT because in this film that would have been something. Something we've seen before a million times, sure, the irresponsible party girl learns to grow up or some such, but it would be a characterization of a type instead of the constant insistently portentious look of either fear or worred confusion that passes for defining the character sans exposition to accompany it or scenes where there is some attempt to shade these heroes and really bring them to life but which still fall flat. Hey... Maybe Sersi starts all serious and mission driven as well as looking out for humans but thousands of years of immortality take it's toll and she started down a path of excess that Ikaris just couldn't live with or understand and THAT is why they've not seen each other for so long and Sersi can feel both unfairly judged and yet heart broken at the same time. Instead she is still a mystery by the end of the movie. Other than, for the millionth time in on screen female hero types, being a "caring nurterer" who looks like Gemma Chan what is it about Sersi that Ikaris is so attracted to? Cuz... It ain't wit or a resilience of character per se. It's just... That' what the script says happens so it is a thing.
I understand that because of the concept these space godlings aren't supposed to be "just like us" completely. But can some of the reactions these characters have make some more sense logically or emotionally?
Hey Kingo... You wanna reveal to a man you claim to care for and whose been a part of your life for fifty plus years that ultimately you don't give a shirt about him and his life and then just See Ya' to everyone before the finale? Cuz... If you want people to think the character is an ash flash... Mission accomplished. There is no greater context here to absolve the character and it's a choice that naturally doesn't sit well with the viewer, if for nothing else Kamal is such an affable screen presence in general. You want to like, bad place, love Kingo, love all the characters but they either behave stangely at times or so much is played close to the vest you just feel cold to what is being said and done on the silver screen.
Hey Phastos, the "smart" Eternal... You cannot just sit out THE END OF THE WORLD.
"I don't wanna leave my family. They mean too much to me."
Well, actually then, I assume they mean very little if you gotta be cajoled into protecting them. I get there's always the rejection of the call to heroism in these stories but Phastos' situation they decided upon applying it without much thought. If his husband and child living matters to him, he'll do what needs to be done and not wait for death to arbitrarily take them from this life when he could directly intervene.
Characterization is not the only place perhaps looking more toward the comics would benefit this movie. In the MCU they certainly streamlined the Eternals concept but in doing so kinda threw out the concepts that make them actually important to the wider world and especially Earth of the Marvel U and this should have been true for this version if for nothing else it puts their mythology in the center of the more influential narrative of the MCU. I'm sorry but... Robots or whatever just makes no sense. Much less sending the same personalities back to do this job of protection for the cause of planetary extermination for millions of years. After the film lets the cat out of the bag that the Celestials are GOD, not lower case "g" but in fact... The true creators of heaven and Earth and all we see with our naked eye, that's cool beans but you've just begged the question of why go through the convolution of sending these Autobot muthaforkas to clean up after the rejects from Duchovny's EVOLUTION? From Thanos' snap to powers from Doc Strange, we've seen powers applied to the craziest of circumstances. You honestly mean to tell me this God race can't, I don't know, just THINK the Deviants out of existence? Why this planet by planet piecemeal approach? I don't wanna hear that we don't really know what the Celestials can do so saying they should be able to destroy the Deviants with minimal effort is just conjecture. Fine... It's conjecture. But the movie itself lays the mantle of GODHOOD on them. I don't know precisely the ins and outs of the staggering control over the fundamental forces of the universe the Celestials would have to possess to forge planets and stars with their own two hands but if they can do that but can't literally destroy the Deviants with a thought it just seems quite arbitrary.
I'm afraid even the vaunted diversity of this cast in some ways doesn't make sense. Why is Makkari deaf? I know... And I mean this... I know how "ableist" that sounds and those who have hearing or sight issues to deal with should have their own representation. But you have to ask... Why would the magic space gods create this godling as being deaf (Plus... ASL in ancient Babylon? How can there be American sign language when there's no America yet? Nit picky? Yeah. That's what happens when the film loses the audience. You start wondering about anything other than the scene playing out in front of you. ) Why was Sprite set as a young female that would never know growing into adult hood physically? The film kinda begs these questions but there's plenty of cover for that IF you follow the comic closer. If the Eternals are not completly artificial, if they do have a culture and are off somewhere in secret breeding slowly over the centuries then you could posit all manner of explanations and justification for stuff. The Celestials experimented on humans, create the Eternals, Deviants (Mistake or not? Well... If they were a speaking counter race to the Eternals you could explore that with them as three dimensional characters.) as well as seeding the genes that will produce the Mutants and come back from time to time to "Judge" and this belief in these sky gods could be shaken even before the start of the film in the modern age by having the seeds of doubt placed long ago by things like Eternals being born in ways where they aren't "perfect" the way the Celestial cosmology they were born into tells them.
Speaking of the mutants... I'm sorry but they had the perfect chance to give us some inkling of the origins of Mutants with the Celestials as being ultimately responsible. But in this film there's not anything to give us the idea that the Celestials have been futzing with human's genetic template in any way. This could have been the one stop shop for anwers about Mutants we've been thirsting years now for and we got a big fat goose egg in place of that. I am more than aware that they don't have to follow the books in exacting detail. But when the changes muddy the waters and nothing emotionally grabbing is done with the characters then maybe some going back to the source for some ideas to further hone rather than reject outright is a good idea.
And I will finally add this about the movie proper... Yes this film, like the movies I wrote about at the top, is too long for what they give us. And it's because of that I don't think the improvements or aspects I wanted would make these already bloated productions any more unweildy because as is, right now, they don't do much with their characters to make you care despite all those over 2 hour run times. This was not because there was no room for better or more expanded script material. They had the room obviously, they just chose keep it all beautiful but hollow, which decribes this film to a T.
As for the ending? I understood Ikaris, what they were going for but I felt nothing but a little bummed by what happened with him and that idea is actually pretty good. But you never really know or care for Ikaris so locking his controls straight for the sun didn't affect me other than thinking, "Cool... Dane can swoop in easy now." The most interesting as a super hero fan parts of this film were the two post credits. Happy to at least hear Ali and yeah... I thought for some reason they were gonna link the Ebony blade to Vamps and looks like I might be right. And the Starfox Pip post cred sent my inner 14 yr old over the moon even as I asked all kind of questions cuz... Eros is Thanos' brother... Both offshoot Eternals. So... Eternals can breed despite being essentially advanced automotons? Yeah, we buy that shirt all the time. Look at Vison and Wanda. Still the original conception gives the characters a more believable and relatable justification when they are a true, biological race.
This was not an offensively bad film. But it was not a truly entertaining one either. I'm surprising myself because I think that the proceedings here and in Shang Chi might actually have been imporoved or at least made generally more entertaining if the characters indeed possessed more of the standard by now Marvel Humor. Because it seems to me now we have a film that sort of proves what I've been saying about the more mediocre Marvel product they've put out over the years. At times it seems they do put more thought and care into crafting the "jokes" and not so much into making a compelling plot or characters that have more than a life than just checking off Marvel Movie Cliche' #174. And when you do clear the board of all that every five minute a joke formula... You actually aren't left with much at all.
