Marvel Studios' Eternals movie review: A cosmic experiment that goes nowhere

Oh, to be an Eternal.

On the surface, Marvel Studios’ Eternals feels like the most exciting experiment to come out of Phase Four yet. This sci-fi epic brings the dense and psychedelic work of Jack Kirby to the big screen with the grounded tone of a family drama, thanks to its director Chloe Zhao, who recently won a Best Picture Oscar for her 2020 movie Nomadland. Her approach to the grand epic that is Eternals’ millennia-spanning story is an intimate one, so focused on its ensemble cast that it loses the plot.

The best thing I can say about Eternals is that it offers something different in the ever-expanding Marvel Cinematic Universe. It steers away from the familiar and generic storytelling we recently saw in Black Widow, but instead falls prey to opaque world-building, weak characters and jarring editing issues.

Where were you when Thanos killed half the universe?

Marvel’s latest superhero family also happens to be its oldest. The Eternals were sent to Earth thousands of years ago by a race of cosmic gods called the Celestials - you might remember Knowhere in Guardians of the Galaxy for example, being the decapitated head of a long-dead Celestial. The Eternals were dispatched to our planet to fend off another race of monsters called the Deviants, which take the form of bloodthirsty monsters hell-bent on ripping apart any human they can find. 

Eternals’ plot unfolds like a globe-spanning epic with very little substance running underneath. The story darts forward by thousands of years at a time, visiting slices of history like Mesopotamia in 5000 BC and Hiroshima in 1945 shortly after the tragic atomic bombing. We see the Eternals discover humanity and grapple with their inability to intervene - hence their absence in Avengers: Endgame, and countless other human wars. Between these flashbacks, we see the Eternals begin to reassemble in the present day as a cataclysmic event looms over them, because what's a Marvel movie without one of those?

Eternals has a lot of world-building to do, and it’s certainly made room for it with a 2.5-hour runtime. The story takes us from one location to the next at a sleepy pace, stopping every so often to spout an essay’s worth of exposition on the Eternals and their place in the universe before moving on. For a long hour or so, the plot feels dangerously repetitive as characters reunite, share some sad news and go off to reunite with someone else again. This cycle repeats itself exactly over and over again until it's time for the third act to begin.

There isn’t a shred of self-awareness here - just moviemakers doing their best to balance an ensemble cast against the Marvel engine. Chloe Zhao would seemingly rather tell an intimate tale about immortal beings without subjecting them to apocalyptic events and monstrous threats. That's not how Marvel operates. Visually, this movie boasts some appealing visuals - even if most of them are same-y golden hour shots in assorted barren locations. Dune, at least, had sandworms and flying ships for variety’s sake. Ramin Djawadi doesn't disappoint with a lush score that feels appropriate for the grand tone this movie shoots for. I noticed a lot of strange editing problems - where the movie would move from one shot to the next without a natural flow, resulting in continuity issues and characters jumping from one place to another within seconds. 

The Deviants themselves feel awkwardly placed in the story, as if they were inserted with the specific purpose of breaking up two long hours of Eternals simply having conversations in different places. It doesn’t help that these conversations are bogged down by uninspired writing. “You do not turn your back against your family,” one character says and makes me wonder if I’d walked into a screening for F9 by accident. As a result, the pacing is thrown askew. We get an exciting action sequence between the Eternals and the Deviants, and then we get forty minutes of characters lamenting their problems. The Deviants themselves end up being surprisingly inessential as the story ramps up, and even the third act’s awesome spectacle comes to a screeching halt every time one character needs to have a chat.

Eternals, disassembled

Marvel Studios had the chance to make a great movie about an alien family of superheroes with the Inhumans - and they botched it. The Eternals are the next best thing, but there is very little to like about them. Each member of this alien family has their own unique power. Ikaris (Richard Madden) is essentially Superman, flying about and shooting golden laser beams from his eyes. Thena (Angelina Jolie) summons this golden energy to form a shield and spear. Kingo (Kumail Nanjiani) gets the coolest powers, in my opinion, firing bolts of energy from his hands using finger guns. Sersi (Gemma Chan) breaks away from the violence with the ability to transmute objects from one form to the other. 

Some of the Eternals are actually fairly interesting. Thena for example, struggles with what seems like the Eternal equivalent of mental illness - where the stress of thousands of years’ worth of memories has begun to take its toll on her mind. Kingo and his valet Karun are the comic relief of the bunch, and Druig (Barry Keoghan) acts as the black sheep of the family. The cast is effortlessly diverse in representation, even featuring a deaf speedster in Makkari (Lauren Ridloff). That representation makes a lot of sense too, considering that characters like Thena and Gilgamesh seem to have left a lasting impact on various aspects of human mythology.

Other members of the cast are unfortunately sidelined despite the amount of screentime dedicated to fleshing them out. Ikaris is hopelessly boring and eternally dour, and while Sprite (Lia McHugh) has an interesting struggle with her youthful appearance, her character arc falls unsatisfyingly short in the movie’s finale. Sersi serves as the movie’s focal point, but all we really learn about her is that she has a boyfriend and loves humanity. She and Ikaris have a millennia-spanning love story but it just can’t be bought into, thanks to a criminal lack of chemistry between both leads. Kit Harington’s inclusion as Dane Whitman is laughably trivial, to the point where it seems engineered to spawn further appearances in the MCU later on. 

Verdict

Marvel Studios’ Eternals delivers enough heroic wonder to satiate the appetite of hardcore MCU fans, but they’ll have to sit through 2.5 hours of needlessly convoluted world-building and listless pacing first. It didn’t have to be this complex. Guardians of the Galaxy had to introduce viewers to an entire universe of creatures and politics operating beyond Earth. All Eternals had to do in that backdrop was reveal the existence of a group of immortal beings, which doesn’t feel like the radical idea this movie wants it to be. There are alien factories, space-dwelling deities and alien races aplenty. For a movie with these elements, it looks and feels awfully plain. 

***

6.5 finger guns out of 10

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