MOVIE REVIEW: The Eternals

(Cast No Shadow - Oasis)

I'm afraid I can't sugar-coat the opening of this review:

'The Eternals' was, generally speaking, a disappointment. 

I want to be clear, the movie is bad because it's a bad movie, not because of the hateful venom being spewed online about people's sexual orientation or how Marvel represents it on-screen.

It may turn into a cult classic one day but for now it stands as one of Marvel's weakest entries, being even less enjoyable for me than even 'Ant-Man'. The film is not without positive qualities. Unfortunately, they're few and far between, buried beneath an utterly ridiculous plot, script, setting, and pretense. I realize that's saying something for a Marvel film; I don't make the statement lightly.  That's a shame. When this movie shines, it's...something more.

The remainder of this review will contain details from the film. I'd normally call them spoilers but they're rather more like warnings this time.

STORY

The Eternals' story is where a lot of this movie's trouble begins. The scope of the story revolves around 10 people over the span of 7,000 years. If you knew nothing else about this film, that single fact should already have alarms ringing in your head. It is not possible to convince the audience to give a crap about TEN PEOPLE when you only have two and a half hours to do it. There just isn't enough time to do that, let alone do that while you enhance your plot.  Let alone do that when you also need to make your audience invest in not one but two villains -and- two different love stories. When you consider this ONE thing, this film never had a chance.

Throughout the course of the last decade, the MCU has established that there were universe-creating creatures called Celestials among us, beings of incalculable power that may or may not be responsible for the Infinity Stones' emergence. This story revolves around those Celestials, the work they do in perpetuating life in the universe, and the methods they use to accomplish that task. 

This...next part is where things start going seriously, wildly,  hilariously off the rails. It's also where the spoilers start.

In order to make new Celestials to help continue Celestial work, Celestials use life-sustaining planets as incubators for baby Celestials. Once every billion years (I think it's billion? I was dazed by the time this came out in the film) a new Celestial is born. The newest Celestial, Tiamut, is incubating inside of Earth, harvesting the energy from ALL LIFE ON THE PLANET to grow and come to 'term'. With the events of 'Endgame' restoring a MASSIVE amount of life on the planet, that provided the kick necessary to start the birthing process for Tiamut, a process that will absolutely destroy Earth and all live on it when it happens.  But that's fine, because there'll be another Celestial in the world and they'll use the sacrifice of billions of lives to create a hundred times that much more life in the universe so it's all good and...

HEY! Pay attention!

The Eternals are a ... race? of simulacrums created by The Celestials, imbued with limitless amounts of celestial power. Every time a planet gets selected as an incubator for a new Celestial, a squadron of Eternals gets sent to the planet to basically protect it and make sure it remains viable for the new baby!

This, if you can believe it, is the sensible part of the story.

Naturally, the Eternals that get sent to Earth fall in love with our charming people and they disobey the orders of their Celestial masters. Chaos ensues. This would be batshit insane on its own for a variety of reasons but the more you scrutinize the film's details, the more things get out of hand. I'll cover some of the bigger stuff at the end but suffice it to say, this movie's story fails it utterly.  More's the pity; the cast of characters in the film is pretty strong. They just had nothing to work with.

CAST

- Lia McHugh plays Sprite, an ageless child Eternal. She does an INCREDIBLE job of channeling an adult trapped in a kid's body and she's one of the treats of the film. In what will be a recurring complaint, it's a crime that she wasn't given more screen time to display her talents and evolve her character. There's SO. MUCH. MORE. to be found there.

- Generally speaking, I don't care for Kumail Nanjiani for the same reasons that I don't care for Paul Rudd. Both actors are, by all accounts, absolutely lovely people who haven't let their fame go to their heads. Most of their mainstream work just happens to be stuff that I don't happen to think showcases their excellence. Nanjiani frequently gets entombed in the kind of insufferable roles that don't allow his wonderful mind to shine through. I understand that it makes money but...I'm getting off track here. Nanjiani is capable of great things when he's not being asked to be a goofball and you can tell that there's depth and layer at work here. Unfortunately, like Sprint, the character of Kingo is shackled by a lack of screen time and an uncomfortably awkward script.

- Gemma Chan's performance is limp as Sersi and she has ZERO chemistry with Ikaris. There was some fanfare made about The Eternals containing Marvel's first attempt at a sex scene and...wow, was THAT ever both completely unnecessary and awkward as hell. Which, they're robots, so... Never mind. The story does set her up being someone who goes 'native' relatively quickly but every other aspect of her character is utterly uncompelling. Worse for the nerdlings out there, while her power is INCREDIBLY cool -- being able to restructure matter at an atomic level -- her use of it is terribly uncreative. You'd think that she'd have some up with some truly amazing things to do with it before now.

- Angelina Jolie continues to impress when she's allowed deeper roles, and Thena is no exception. There's a whole other review I could write about her cognitive decline but for those of us who have lived through that with a loved one, her performance is...uncomfortably familiar.

- Good for Kit Harrington and getting away from Game Of Thrones. Completely putting aside how comfortable he is with pretty much EVERYTHING as the movie unfolds, Harrington's Dane Whitman is one of the most easily watched things in the whole movie.

- I very much hope people were paying attention to Laura Ridloff in this film. She did more without speaking a word than some of the others did with whole reams of dialogue. As a representative of the Deaf community, Marvel could have shelved her for a lot of this movie.  Instead, she was strongly integrated into the film, her hearing loss was never treated as a negative, and she acted her pants off in every single scene. Pay attention to the anguish when Druig takes it in the teeth. We need to see more of her, not because she's a member of several under-represented minorities, but because she's got such massive presence on screen.

- Who the hell was Kro?  That is all.

- I can't decide if what we got out of Salma Hayek was a bait and switch or not... either way, Hayek's presence on screen is regal as hell. Bonus point for her not being turned into a sex icon on screen AGAIN.

- I'd love to say more about Don Lee as Gilgamesh but he had almost no screen time and even less time for character development. 

- Brian Tyree Henry needs more work. He killed it as Phastos, even when the script tried to keep him from it.

- Maybe it was Ikaris as a character. Maybe it was Richard Madden playing him.  Maybe it was the script he was handed. I dunno. All I know is that I could not be bothered to give a fart on a calm day.

AUDIO AND VIDEO

I don't have much to say here. Some of the CG in this movie was amazing. Any time the Eternals were using their powers, it was something to behold. Some of the CG in this movie was terrible though. Some of the scenes with Kro in particular were B-Movie level bad.

Of greater note, at least for me, was a truly underwhelming score from Ramin Djawadi, a man rapidly making his mark for exactly the opposite.  He's this generation's next Hans Zimmer, a man who usually shows up and absolutely SLAYS.  Not so here.

THE OTHER STUFF

This is all just random at this point. There were so many parts of this film where I had to pause it and look at my wife and just sputter with incredulity. She just shrugged each time and went, "I know."

- Consider that this film takes place at around the same time as 'Spider-Man: Far From Home." Now consider HOW PLANETARY PHYSICS WORK. Tiamut was supposed to be incubating IN THE CENTER OF THE EARTH. Just the act of that fucker's hand punching to the surface FROM THE CENTER OF THE EARTH would have permanently fucked Earth in so many different ways. 

- Consider that this film takes place at around the same time as 'Spider-Man: Far From Home," a film with elements in overlapping locations with some weirdness that happens in The Eternals. And yet somehow this whole film flies under the radar for that movie and the next Spider-Man film AND Hawkeye AND Loki and...

- The Celestials are basically Gods, capital G. They are also apparently Morons, capital M. Let me count the ways:

1. Baby Celestials need planetary life to sustain them and the film certainly makes it look like they're the ones creating the planets that their babies grow in, so...why not seed the planet with the kind of optimum life required to grow their kids? 

2. "We are so smart that we created a planet with dinosaurs when what we really wanted were sentiment homo-sapienesque life forms.  Let's make OTHER dinosaurs to take out the first dinosaurs!" Followed by, "Oh shit, we made second dinosaurs too good! Rather than using our god-like powers to simply get rid of them, let's make EVEN MORE POWERFUL minions to go take care of the second dinosaurs and cross our cosmically large fingers that we didn't make this second batch of minions too good as well!" Followed by, "Shit. We did it again." Roll credits.

3. You're seriously going to sit here and tell me that the Once In a Billion Baby is being born and Arishem wasn't right there watching the whole time to make sure it went off without a hitch? "Yeah, this is the wife's second baby. We're going paint-balling and leaving the uterus at home on the counter. It's an old hand at this by now, it'll be fine."

4. "Guys, I have bad news.  We had the chance to create the perfect midwives for our new baby and we may have accidentally made ones with both the inclination and power to kill it instead, in spite of the fact that said baby is approximately one gajillion times the size of said midwives. Which they did. On the plus side, we did create said midwives with the completely unnecessary ability to bone, which they ALSO did, so it's not a complete loss." Roll credits.

5. "Oh, just...one more thing. In our infinite wisdom, we created a being who will live forever, eventually WANT to bone, but we've trapped her in the body of a child so she won't ever be able to pursue meaningful and intimate relationships of any kind. We don't really see this as a problem, but heads up anyway."

I could go on.

- The scale of this movie is too big. Marvel has a problem with this in general in that they have to find ways to continually amp up the stakes. Little villains won't do anymore because we know when they get too rowdy, an Avenger or two will show up, find the secret door, and get business done. The normal people have gotten powerful enough that you're telling me no one knows about the Eternals, about their ship, about their comings and goings? In the same breath, you're also telling me that both the Eternals and the Celestials didn't feel the need to get involved in anything that happened in Infinity War? "The next babby is coming but this swollen purple marshmallow with delusions of grandeur, BROTHER TO ONE OF OUR OWN CREATIONS, is threatening said babby."

- Somehow Sersi's date is the fucking Black Knight, which...you know, why not? She wouldn't have any way of knowing that shit at all, no real reason to keep track of that kind of shit...

- I could give no shits about a drunk space dwarf and Starfox. What an utter waste of a stinger's potential.

There are... so many different moving pieces in this film. Many of them have really incredible potential, some of them could probably carry their own film, but most of them either didn't have time or simply didn't belong together in a single movie. Some of the critical acclaim being heaped on this movie talks about how it's going places that no other Marvel movie has ever been before.  I'm sorry to say that there's ample evidence to suggest that perhaps there's a reason Marvel hasn't gone there...