Eternals
The Next Phase of the MCU
I so badly wanted to like this movie. I wanted to see how the next phase of the MCU was going to be set up and I wanted to fall in love with these characters the way Iron Man and Cap made us fall in love with the franchise.
And maybe that was my undoing, having so many expectations for this movie that I had no choice but to be disappointed.
I watched the trailers, I speculated with friends, I skimmed online forums about this movie, and I built this fantastical vision of something equivocating between good and bad but that could only toe that line because so many people were watching. If it makes people talk, then it’s good, right?
Whether something is good or bad is purely subjective. We are all allowed to have opinions on things, and it is my misfortune to have one straying into the negatives.
It is hard to follow up in a cinematic universe that has been unparalleled so far, as our expectations for it are sky-high. That, and how this was a movie built solely on exposition to introduce a new theatrical arc, makes me take my own thoughts on this plot with a grain of salt.
This is a movie about powerful people coming to terms with their existence and purpose in life.
And this is a newsletter about the things that felt off to me.
And if you disagree, please, tell me why! I want to be proven wrong. I want to talk about these stories because they exist and we can always learn how to be better.
Story
There was so much happening, yet nothing was happening.
This movie was 2 1/2 hours of exposition to differentiate itself from the previous renditions of the MCU, but also to set the stage, dressings, props, and lighting cues for all that is to come.
Eternals was trying to do a lot— but it does so in a way that weakens the story.
We meet so many characters. We get little slices of their life, snapshots of personality, the sit-down-someone-important-to-us-died spiel, so many times, it feels tedious and impractical.
A lot of this movie was a meet and greet, a touch bases and then disappear, kind of story that didn’t have an actual storyline until the last 30 minutes.
Cinematically it was beautiful. Some of the acting was phenomenal. The CGI was absolutely breathtaking.
ALL OF IT acting as smoke and mirrors to distract you from the glaring problems with story and character.
Besides being a long overdue family reunion and a sudden arrival of deviants that are becoming sentient and hunting the Eternals themselves, the main goal is comically absent or unrealized for a majority of the movie.
They need to get all the Eternals together to…do what? Fight the deviants, as they’ve been doing? Warn the other Eternals? Inform them of the death of the matriarch Ajak?
Only in the final stretch of the movie do we get a clear idea of what the conflict is (amongst themselves) and what the protagonists need to do. Which is usually how mysteries play out, but felt very wrong and delayed in this genre of action-superhero.
And one of the worst undoings was the lack of a clear protagonist from the beginning.
Character
Too many characters, too many storylines to grab at and focus on.
It took me a long ass, hot minute to realize that Gemma Chan’s character Sersi was the main character we should be focusing on (I thought it was the Sebastian Stan lookalike with an Irish accent, but even he wasn’t the main character). And it’s not her fault that the character seems innocuous and boring, but the way she is written.
Once we split off from the group of Eternals, we stick with Sersi, but she is just bland enough and paired with other characters of more interest almost immediately that her as the protagonist only fit the bill when she received Ajak’s spherical voice box.
Ensemble casts are hard to do, especially with one as jam-packed with namebrand actors and not enough screentime to flesh them out into something meaningful.
There is barely enough time to give 10 characters definitive and identifiable traits. Their actions are stiff and do not convey their personalities. Their dialogue sounds stilted and forced. Their very interactions don’t feel like they’ve known each other for hundreds of thousands of years with all the happy, bitter memories to show for it.
They were killed, knocked into mountains, zapped by Eternals’ energy beams, yet all I could think was: damn that looks cool and not oh GAWD I hope they’re not dead.
In spite of director Chloe Zhao’s attempts to humanize them and make them personable to us, I found it hard to care for 2-dimensional characters that had no presence on the screen.
Caveat
But I’m just one voice out of many who have watched this movie. I don’t know the comic history, I am blissfully unaware of the lore, I am ignorant of their machinations for future films to come out.
This very well could be exactly what they need to lay the ground work for the rest of the universe expanding into celestials and multiverses.
I’m just saying, if we look at the story and the characters independently, on their own, as a single movie taken at face value, I am nothing but disappointed.
There is no story. And I don’t care how much it sets up or what Easter eggs were strategically woven into the background or interspersed in the cut scenes. There is no story.
Not a story that is compelling or interesting, or more than just a mishmash of situations strung together.
I know Marvel can make amazing stories, so why did this one have to fall so flat?
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I keep using The Eternals as a reference point for other things I watch now. IT was just dissapointing. Having Watched this and James Gunn's The Suicide Squad so close together the thing that really stood out to me is how UN-cinematic the Eternals is. All of the shots are really pretty.. To look at.
I've made the joke that The Eternals is the most expensive Apple TV screensaver ever made because all the vistas and environments look cool and are great photographic shots.
The problem is that it's a movie and it just doesn't feel kinetic.
The biggest scene the exemplifies this is a scene later in the movie were sersi and ikaris are having a convo about what to do next. And it's in this beautiful location and they just keep cutting back and forth. Shot- reverse shot. Like it's a soap opera. I don't think they were both even shown in the frame at the same time, Let the actors act. Let them move around the scene or move the camera around them.
This, to me, is the brilliance of a Gunn, or Waititi. They move the camera, they use the medium of film really well. And while the Eternals was a beautiful film it just felt so static all the time as if nothing was moving because the scenes were so basic. Instead of using camera movement and scene composition to convey character they just let the expository dialogue do it while you got to look at a nice screen saver.
I agree it was just disappointing. Which sadly comes back to the direction. The Eternals is a great movie to have on at a local Target to show how pretty your TV's are. It's a tech demo for beautiful vistas! But sitting through it is a slog.