A Review of Marvels “Eternals”

Every Marvel movie has a meaning, all of it’s connected in some way and this one is no different, which means that with every new Marvel movie, you have to look at the past, present, and future of the MCU (Marvel Cinematic Universe). With Eternals, there’s much to look at and lots to dissect, but there’s also lots to critique so firstly we’ll go to a general synopsis.

Eternals, one of the most unique Marvel movies, has the setting go back to ancient Mesopotamia and back to 5 years in the future where the MCU currently lives. There is no specific location it takes place, it travels to many places such as London, South Dakota, and even Antarctica.

Out of all the MCU movies, this by far introduces the most new characters within a single film. Firstly there are the Eternals themselves, we have the prime eternal Ajak (Salma Hayek) who is considered to be their leader of the Eternals, her powers consist of being able to heal others. Then there’s Ikaris(Richard Madden) who can fly and shoot lasers out of his eyes, next up is Sersi(Gemma Chan), who can turn items into other things, such as rock into water. There’s also Thena (Angelina Jolie) goddess of war, Gilgamesh (Don Lee) who has super strength, Sprite (Lia McHugh) she can create illusions, Fasto s(Brian Tyree Henry) who is a master inventor, Kingo (Kumail Nanjiani) can absorb and shoot energy, Druig (Barry Keoghan) can influence the mind, and finally our last eternal is Makkari(Lauren Ridloff) has super speed. Now we can move onto the 3 main side characters one of them is considered the “Villain”, first we have Dane(Kit Harrington), Sersi’s love interest, who plays a more important role later, Karun (Harish Patel) who is Kingos valet but mostly used for comedic relief. Lastly, we have the “villain” Arishem. Arishem is a celestial an all-knowing being who is responsible for creating and ending life within the MCU.

The purpose of the Eternals being brought to earth, according to Arishem, is to defeat out-of-this-world beings called deviants. The reason being is they are killing humans and seizing intelligent life from advancing. This narrative is believed by the Eternals during the beginning of the movie but then they learn that their true purpose on earth is to protect intelligent life until the population reaches the requirement to allow another celestial to emerge. The new celestial will be born from the earth, resulting in the planet being destroyed and all life on it dying. The Eternals are not happy about most of them, Ikaris believes that the emergence should not be stopped and should allow it to happen. While the other except for Kingo and Sprite believe that the emergence should be stopped. That is the extremely basic premise of this story without spoiling anything important.

Because of Marvel’s popularity, it’s worth examining the positives of the film first. One outstanding thing is the cinematography in this film, the direction, and the lighting is absolutely fantastic as well as the sound design in this film is great, the sounds feel real and it really creates a good atmosphere for what this movie is, a superhero film. This could be the most unique Marvel movie there is, it strays away from the classic superhero good guy beat bad guy end of the story and moves more towards a story-heavy character-based meaningful story that still leaves you pondering after the film. This is a great thing that Marvel is gravitating towards, but they could have pulled it off better.

Eternals attempts to differentiate itself from the rest of the MCU with a new formula, the formula they use works very well however the way they cooked it together didn’t really come out as nice as most hoped. Let’s start with the characters, there are just too many to introduce into one film and try to make a connection with each one. After the first viewing, it was difficult to remember the name of some characters, by the second the names were easier to remember, but most people aren’t going to see it twice, and if they couldn’t remember the names of your main characters that’s a problem. The other thing is the story is lacking, at many points during the story they’ll bring something up that seems important and then it just never comes up again. Also, something that’s not enjoyable is that they just forget about characters (SPOILER ALERT!) before the final battle Kingo who is shown as a very important character throughout the whole film just straight up leaves before the final battle and is just forgotten about, he is shown later on but very briefly. (END OF SPOILERS) Now after going over critiques, we’ll move on to the review.

Eternals is good but not the level expected from Marvel, with movies such as Thor: Ragnorak and Guardians of the Galaxy which are my personal favorite Marvel movies, you’d think Marvel would have a higher standard as to where the quality of this movie should be. With whole parts of the plot missing, characters don’t make a large enough impact, and sometimes just not making sense this movie has lots of problems. There’s good things like the visuals and sound design but it doesn’t save it from what it truly is. With all that, the overall final score of 5/10, and for a Marvel movie that’s very low which is disappointing but it’s the highest score it deserves.