The Doctor’s Diagnosis: D+
This being the fourth Marvel movie of the year, with a fifth one coming before the year ends, I’m really running out of shit to say about these things. Lame CGI monsters and lamer comic relief and blah blah. Whatever. Let’s just get fucking on with it.
Eternals reveals that ten superheroes have been on Earth for thousands of years and tasked with protecting humanity. Why, then, did they not interfere when Thanos wiped out half of humanity? Or even to stop Hitler or a hundred other major atrocities? Because they apparently have a very, very strict definition of their job. They were sent to Earth by Arishem (who is from a race of beings called celestials) to protect humans from CGI dog monsters called deviants that look like shitty versions of Gozer’s minions. Apparently, the Eternals have a strong labor union that excludes anything other than dog monsters from their definition of protecting humanity. They seemingly eliminated the last of the deviants about 500 years ago and have been dicking around ever since (our heroes, folks), but a sudden reemergence of deviants has caused a couple of the Eternals to reassemble the group.
Okay, I need to get into SPOILERS for just this paragraph to get one more thing off my chest. I’ll mark the end of the spoilers. It turns out that the Eternals weren’t really sent there to protect Earth. Well, they were, but just temporarily. The seeds of celestials are planted in planets and take centuries to become ready to give creation to a new celestial being. Arishem planted such seeds on Earth, then sent deviants to kill off apex predators so that intelligent life could develop, because a suitable mass of intelligent life is needed for the celestial to be born. However, the Eternals are sent to protect humans from the deviants, so that the celestial can grow. Once the celestial is ready, his emergence will then kill all life on Earth. The reversal of Thanos’ snap has created sufficient life on Earth of this event to happen. That’s a long buildup for me to ask the following question: If Thanos was a threat to the emergence of the celestial, and the snap would have significantly delayed this event, then why the fuck weren’t the Eternals instructed to help fight Thanos? If their only job was to preserve the growth of the human population, why the fuck wouldn’t they interfere in genocides? That’s like telling someone to guard the front door, then they stand by and watch while people break through the window and rob you blind. You know what you would do with such a guard? You would fire their overly-literal ass. That’s what you would fucking do. END SPOILERS.
The other main issue is that these characters just aren’t very interesting or imposing. The cast is certainly diverse, and that’s apparently supposed to make the movie more interesting, because Arishem assembled the Eternals thousands of years ago almost as if he was a modern-day Disney executive going down a diversity checklist. He even included a deaf character, because you would certainly design one of your warriors with a disability. However, despite the inspiring diversity, there is an overwhelming sameness to the characters. They all like to stand around looking stoic and pondering their role in the universe. Other than Icarus, I can’t remember any of their names and I’m not even sure what some of their powers are. Their interactions with one another lack the weight of people that have supposedly been working together for thousands of years because they have as much charisma as a brick wall and a wet blanket having dinner together.
Here is the standard part of the Marvel review where I bitch about the comic relief character. In my review of Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, I asked the following question: Have you ever wondered what Kat Denning’s character from Thor would be like if she was Asian? Well, Eternals brings that question to another level: Have you ever wondered what Awkwafina’s character from Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings would be like if she was a middle-aged Indian man? Oh, Marvel, how you keep things fresh and exciting. Fuck it, I’m just going to quote myself from the Shang Chi review and change the pronouns because it’s the same fucking thing: “There is absolutely no reason for this character to be in 90% of this movie. In fact, it is sometimes distractingly stupid that she he is being included in what’s happening. She He serves no purpose but to stand around looking confused and making lame jokes and I can’t fucking stand this shtick anymore. I’m aware that these characters are intended as avatars for the audience, providing a grounded character through whom we can view the increasingly bizarre world of the story. However, Marvel’s insistence that such characters also be obnoxious, inappropriately comedic jackwagons is really starting to grind my gears.”
Here is the standard part of the Marvel review where I bitch about the shitty CGI monsters and overblown battle in the last act. So the movie has terrible-looking CGI dragons dogs and ends in a giant battle in a hidden city volcano and….you know what? I’m not putting in the effort anymore. Read any of my last ten Marvel reviews, change some nouns and you get the idea. Wash, rinse, repeat.
The film is directed by Chloé Zhao, who is best known for the awful, yet Oscar winning Nomadland. You wouldn’t be able to tell that because, other than a couple of establishing shots in the country, there is nothing that evokes the style of Nomadland and Eternals looks like every other Marvel movie. I honestly have no idea why Marvel bothers hiring these big-name directors to create assembly-line movies. Nobody is going to see this because of the director, so why bother? You could bring in Quentin Tarantino, Francis Ford Coppola and Steven Spielberg to make a Marvel movie and they would all end up producing basically the same thing. It’s like putting Bobby Flay into a Burger King to assemble Whoppers. Literally anyone else could produce the same product, but I’m supposed to think that there is some added artistic merit because of the name of the person throwing the onions and pickles onto the burger. There isn’t. The next Whopper that I eat will taste like the last one I ate and the next Marvel movie I see will feel like the last one I saw, regardless of the name of the line cook or the filmmaker.
This isn’t the worst Marvel movie of the year (that’s easily Venom: Let There Be Carnage) or the best (that’s the slightly above mediocre Black Widow), but it is the most forgettable (and that’s saying something after Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings). I guess if you just want to shut your brain down and watch people have big CGI fights for nearly three hours, it will meet your incredibly low standards for entertainment. It mainly made me contemplate how little I give a shit about these movies anymore. Even the post-credit scenes have gone from the “holy shit!” of the early Marvel films to the “who is that?” of the current ones. Maybe the introduction of the multiverse will shake things up, but this formula is becoming insufferable.
Image By: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternals_(film)#/media/File:Eternals_(film)_poster.jpeg
