The Eternals Thread
By Scott Keith on 6th November 2021
Just got back from Eternals and I know people have requested a spoiler thread for discussing the MCU movies, so here we go! Spoilers ahoy!
I thought it was just OK. The movie has been pretty polarizing and I was kind of in the middle on it, didn’t hate it, but didn’t love it. It didn’t really felt like it carried anything onwards or set anything up for the future, it was just kind of a side-diversion that set up a lot of big picture mystical stuff and then hand-waved it all away.
“Hey, why didn’t you stop Thanos?”
“Um, because.”
“Fair enough.”
“Hey, why can’t you use your all-powerful ability to brainwash thousands of people at once and stop wars and death?”
“Um, because.”
“Fair enough.”
That sort of thing over and over for 2.5 hours. Set up ridiculously overpowered protagonists and then be forced to come up with reasons why they can’t use their powers. Also, kind of misleading for the movie to be called “Eternals” and have three of them end up dead by the end of the movie. Can they die or not? Much like a lot of stuff in the movie, the script was never really clear on that point. Also, it felt like they were trying to cram a lot of twists and turns into the origin movie, with not one but two major rug-pulls by the end. I dunno, I barely knew who most of the people were by the midway point and I’m supposed to be invested in them enough to be concerned when Ikarus turns on them?
Anyway, I don’t want it to sound like I hated the movie, because it was enjoyable enough, but this is the second mainline MCU entry in a row where they were essentially treading water, third if you count Black Widow. I’m all for trying new things but I’d really like them to figure out the actual point of Phase 4 and get back to superheroes and space battles and shit at some point soon. This one was too long and tried to cram too many people and too much stuff into it. Infinity War worked because they had earned that goodwill with all the previous movies, this was just “Hey, Jack Kirby wrote it, so it must be good, right?”