Eternals Review

November 4, 2021 at 5:14pm
By Jason Stettner

Eternals is the latest entry in the ever expanding Marvel Cinematic Universe. It’s a film of firsts in regards to representation within its diverse cast and most importantly, the first Marvel movie I’ve ever been bored of. This was insanely long, slow and generally incoherent in regards to its storytelling. A real shame considering the talent behind this, and the strong cast of characters. I’d say the strength of this film are the many individuals that make up this team, they were perhaps just too many of them.

It’s hard to keep track, or even care about these individuals as we don’t know them. You would think with such a sprawling runtime that we might be able to get connected with them but there certainly wasn’t the same connection as in say Guardians of the Galaxy which is much shorter and far more effective in balancing a swath of new characters.

They spend a massive chunk of the film getting the band back together, and that felt wasted. Should have just montaged that into a shorter time span in order to focus more on the morals the team was debating. It was a whole lot of revisionist history as well as the film aimed to balance explaining how these individuals were part of our culture since almost the beginning. Similar to those Transformers movies, in how they would re-explain parts of human history to fit the robots in.

There are of course some surprises one might say in the story, but everything was ever so predictable and again boring. By the time of the big reveal I was debating on leaving, it felt as though it would never end and by the time it does it just feels empty. The luxury of the Marvel universe is that there are now ways they can explore these characters across multiple entries in film or TV and instead they just threw a whole lot at people.

This dives into the cosmic side of Marvel, the Olympian aspects and also plants it firmly on Earth while also not truly examining humanity which I thought was odd. As mentioned, the story itself feels all over the place. There are times where characters just leave, moments where you forget some characters are there and others leaving you wondering if they’d ever get back to what was going on. It feels like whole chunks of the movie were missing, and with such a bloated runtime you have to wonder just how long this was originally supposed to be.

It’s hard to quite pinpoint the core of this team, as there are just so many characters with almost random motivations at times. It appears that this is largely centered around Sersi (Gemma Chan), with her relationship to both humanity and Ikaris (Richard Madden). The two somewhat seem to share the most screen time whereas if you’re expecting much Dane Whitman (Kit Harington) you’re going to be left disappointed there. This is, as mentioned a massive cast so there are many individuals that make up this team.

You’ve got Kingo (Kumail Nanjiani) who is somewhat there in random spots. There’s the engineer Phastos (Brian Tyree Henry) who I would imagine might have some aspects cut depending on the region you go to watch this in. There’s the distant warrior Thena (Angelina Jolie) and also a magical healer Ajak (Salma Hayek). There’s the quirky Sprite (Lia McHugh) that’s all over the place and don’t worry, their Eternal element gets worked out.

We’ve Makkari (Lauren Ridloff) a speedster that gets forgotten entirely until they’re needed. We’ve got the rather annoying Druig (Barry Keoghan), a powerhouse cook Gilgamesh (Ma Don-seok) and then there’s Karun (Karish Patel), he’s cool. I think I got most of the essential characters, there’s a whole lot going on here so keep that in mind. They don’t all get a chance to shine, but for what they were present for the performances came across as generally solid as did the roles they all had to play.

Again, this was one of the strengths of the film. You just tend not to care about them because there are just too many. You don’t get the time to know them despite the long run time so when things happen it’s a big meh or sigh about it as I getting to the point of being tired of watching. This also really lacked that usual wit that the universe is known for. It wasn’t very funny, it also wasn’t very serious and it’s just this weird middle bland sort of feeling.

Not every Marvel film needs to be comical, but this could have used something to cause a spark of excitement. The most entertaining aspect of the entire film was someone getting bopped on the head. While characters are fascinating, I should also talk about the visual component. The cinematography here was splendid for the most part, but that also didn’t help in making it feel slow. The wonder wasn’t quite focused on as much as it could have been.

You’ve got cosmic stuff going on with super powered characters and I wasn’t thrilled by what was going on so that sort of missed the mark there. The CGI quality was generally top notch, I didn’t notice anything that stuck out so that was good. It came across as clean, with unique powers being displayed at any given time. I did find their ship to be incredibly boring, it’s just a triangle.

The Conclusion

Eternals has many firsts, but alas the most important aspect is that it was the first time I was ever bored watching a Marvel film and it won’t be one that I will ever revisit. You could say that the runtime, was Eternal. It’s got some cool ideas in here, but the movie itself is just hard to sit through. It’s overly long with too many characters and the plot is incoherent.

It took forever to get the group together and by the end I felt it was uncomfortable watching as I was fidgeting around waiting for it to be over. It’s got some neat characters, with cool abilities and yet I don’t really care for any of them. This is of course setting up another layering to the cosmic side of Marvel but I also feel like you really don’t miss anything by skipping out on this one. There are some ramifications for Earth considering some celestial elements were shown, that should be neat to explain later.

I was also at times wondering where the Avengers were at considering what was going on, but I also need to shove that thought away when watching solo films I suppose. If you could call this a solo film of course, definitely an ensemble. Anyways, this really wasn’t that great. I get that they were maybe aiming for something more deep in terms of being a unique award eye catching experience but this missed that mark by a lot.

I tend to love the more artistic types of films, The French Dispatch last week was wonderful whereas this feels bland. It’s not fun and entertaining like the other films in the franchise while also failing to be anything profound. A rare miss, being the worst of the Marvel Cinematic Universe thus far. I hope they don’t stop experimenting though, as I do want to see distinct and fresh experiences as we get more movies from Marvel in the years to follow.

Eternals Review at Theater with Standard Viewing
Screening was Provided by Disney

Rating Overall: 3.8