I’ve been a hardcore comic book reader for 30 years or so and the Eternals movie was perhaps the first in the MCU where I didn’t already have in depth knowledge about the characters, I’ve never been a big Eternals fan and maybe read one or two comics back in the day featuring them…So in a way I was able to go into this film with a much more wide open mind than past films where I already had a preconceived notion of how the characters should be. I actually went into it with high hopes regardless of all the bad reviews I had heard and I suppose I’ll start out with the stuff I liked about the film.
For starters it had a really good cast, maybe not top tier actors but certainly a few big names including Angelina Jolie and Salma Hayek and the movie started out good enough…giving us a glimpse into the origins of the Eternals and how they showed up on Earth around 5000 BC to try and wipe out the Deviants…which are really just the antithesis of the Eternals in the comics but sadly in the film they were portrayed as mostly generic “monsters”…they looked cool enough but didn’t really have any depth to them…even later on when one of them evolves into being able to speak it still seemed like a generic good vs. evil type of deal.
There was a decent amount of good action scenes and I did appreciate the wide range of powers the Eternals have but they all looked so much alike it became kind of stale to watch them after a while…I wasn’t a huge fan of most of the characters but did really like Gilgamesh although I did feel the humor was forced a bit, not just with Gilgamesh but the entire movie…I do appreciate a bit of humor in my action movies but I think they shoved too much into this one and kind of ruined a few scenes in the process.
There were also quite a few details that I’d consider plot holes to some degree…maybe I’m mistaken but I believe the deaf chick was using American Sign Language in 5000 BC…which obviously makes no sense at all. As much as I understood that they fell in love with Earth and wanted to stop it’s destruction I couldn’t grasp the fact that afterwards they went out to stop it happening on all other planets…Seeing the celestials literally seed universes and nothing would exist without their process it seems a little off that they’d go out into space to try and stop the rest of them…I also didn’t feel like I was watching a MCU movie, which is both good and bad I guess.
It’s certainly worth a watch if it just happens to be there for free to watch but I would have been pissed if I had spent money to see this film…IMO the best part of the movie was the post credits scene with the Black Knight…I’m also not sure how this film sets up any of the future of the MCU, it just felt so disconnected from the ret of the films…I’d probably give the movie a 4 or 5 out of 10…If you’re looking for a generic action movie then you’ll probably enjoy it but if you’re hoping to get sucked deeper into the MCU and all it’s stories you won’t find that here…just a lot of plot holes in the end really…it’s likely my least favorite MCU movie thus far but hey, that’s just my opinion.
The Listerzine 
Leave a Reply