Movie Review: Eternals

Eternals [2021]

This MCU movie is... a tricky one to talk about. It's arguably another gamble by the MCU studios, one they made a couple of 'phases' ago with Guardians of the Galaxy -- take a relatively pretty obscure C-lister team from the comics, and use them to star in a standalone movie with minimal connections to the rest of the MCU world. Also, use that movie to be a jumping point for some of the main plot points of the over-reaching arc. In Guardians of the Galaxy's case, we learned about Thanos and the Infinity Stones. For Eternals, we learned about the Celestials and the Eternals... and I really do think that the story they're trying to tell with these amount of characters would've worked better as a TV show with maybe double the screentime to give the characters breathing room. 

It's just that this movie was kind of... a bit too busy for its own good. Don't get me wrong -- I find it a pretty solid movie on its own merits, and having read some Eternals comics before this movie came out, I was at least appreciative of what they did with the source material. 

Visually, too, it's not quite a faithful adaptation of Jack Kirby's signature comic-book-art style, but I really don't think any comic book can? At least they tried, and if nothing else the effects of those golden energy constructs that the Eternals use to manifest their powers look cool -- special mention goes to Gilgamesh's gauntlets, Thena's many weapons, and Phastos' metallic constructs. 

But where Guardians stuck with a much more manageable team of five people (and one of that number is a tree with Pokemon speech), and the first X-Men movie did more or less the same, Eternals gave us a mind-numbing ten Eternals. That's not counting at least three (arguably four) other recurring characters that run around our cast. They definitely tried a bit too much, and while I absolutely enjoyed the performances of practically every single actor of this all-star cast, I would admit that as a whole, the story does suffer a bit from having so many characters. Anyone who doesn't pay attention to the Star-Wars-style opening crawl would definitely be a bit bamboozled with the whole "Eternals" and "Deviants" and "Celestials" terms being thrown around. 

Personally speaking, saying that the movie felt like it was paced badly wouldn't exactly be right, since we go back and forth between the Eternals in present-day (or, well, MCU-Earth circa 2023, after Endgame) and their past in the history whenever our titular Eternals go around on their little globetrotting journey and meet the requisite members of their team. Oh, and whenever Sersi discovers more and more information about the true nature of the Eternals. 

It's a bit too much for me to go through the movie scene-by-scene, so I'm going to go through the less-interesting way of telling the story and talk about the concept, then the plot, then the characters. Basically, the movie sets the Eternals up as a group of essentially benevolent alien gods, sent on a giant flat slab of a spaceship to arrive on Earth to protect the prehistoric humans from the monstrous creatures known as the Deviants. There's definitely a bit of a nod to the classic 2001: A Space Odyssey here with the giant obelisk-esque structure baffling the humans... before we get some pretty great action scenes that you expect from an MCU movie. This scene is admittedly played to hell and back throughout all the promotional trailers for the movie, but it is pretty cool seeing how Eternals showed off Ikaris's Superman-style flight and eye beams, or Makkari's super-speed.

We also learn that the Eternals commune with the god-like robotic being, Arishem, who the movie really does play up as something otherworldly whenever his six giant glowing face-holes take up the screen. He doesn't really feel like a person and more like a force of nature -- contrast him, for example, to What If's portrayal of Uatu or Moon Knight's Khonshu. Arishem intentionally feels and sounds robotic and otherworldly, setting him apart as just this... this deity in all but name that sends the Eternals out on their ambiguous mission. 

Which, I guess, spoiling the halfway-point plot... it's not actually enriching humanity and killing the Deviants like what they thought it is, but it's just to prime Earth with life so that all the life can be consumed by the nascent Celestial Tiamut that lives within Earth, who would appear in a process called the 'Emergence'. Which... yeah, the movie does a decent job at giving exposition, but there is definitely some questions on where the Deviants play into all this (Arishem says they're the 'first failed creations') and why the Eternals don't just... know their mission from the get-go? It's a bit convoluted and honestly could've been explained a bit better. 

And they look like gods descending upon humanity (and, in this case, it is definitely very appropriate that the movie went aggressively ethnically diverse with the casting) and we get to see bits and bytes of the individual Eternals' personality as we go through the movie itself, as well as ultimately their conflict when they argue about interfering with humanity's growth too much. I'll talk more about them as we go through the characters themselves, but ultimately the Eternals split up at around 1510's or something, and they stay hidden, gods walking among mortals. 

There is a bit of a fan-disliked explanation that the Eternals were simply sworn to non-interference when Thanos (and literally all the other supervillains) attacked. I've seen much worse explanations before, though I suppose a better explanation would be that they were all Snapped? Eh. 

Go to 2023 (or wherever present-day is), and we see two of the Eternals living together in London -- Sersi, our titular main character, and the youthful Sprite. We get some typical 'civilian lives' scene, before a slightly-more-intelligent Deviant called Kro appears in London. We get to see the displays of their powers -- Sersi has matter transformation and Sprite can make illusions. Ultimately Ikaris shows up and eye-beams the Deviant away. And I guess since that's how the movie kind of introduces us to them, I'll talk through these characters as they appear? 

So Sersi is our titular main character. Played by the excellent Gemma Chan (previously in the MCU as Minn-Erva) she's... she's all right? The actor is clearly trying her best, but she mostly stands in as the audience's proxy as she goes around and re-meets the rest of her Eternal 'family'. She's kind of generically heroic and has the whole 'leadership' character arc thrust upon her when she discovers that she has been chosen by Arishem as the next 'Prime Eternal', but... but what's left beyond that is her romantic relationship, which, I'm sorry... the actors do their best, and I'm not going to say that they don't have chemistry or anything, but the movie's just got so many moving parts that I never really get invested in any of Sersi's relationships. 

Speaking of which, let me just drop Dane Whitman here. Played by Game of Thrones' Kit Harrington, Dane Whitman is a pretty major character in the comics as the Black Knight. And... he really doesn't do anything at all in the movie, and if not for the casting, I'm pretty sure most of the cast would forget he exists. I suppose he's important to be a concrete, tangible example of Sersi's connection to mortality, but... realistically, he shows up, drops some funny one-liners as he gets bamboozled during the London scene, and then disappears from the plot entirely. 

Sprite hangs out with Sersi the most and gets probably one of the most screentime out of anyone not named Ikaris or Sersi, but she's... kind of just there? The actor, again, does a splendid job especially considering her age, but other than some verbal sparring with Kingo, she kind of just fizzles into being the one-note butt to 'haha, she's a kid' jokes. Which, of course, actually ends up backfiring on the rest of the Eternals when she actually sides with (spoiler alert!) Ikaris when he reveals his true colours.  There's something that's rather interesting to be said here with how Sprite's essentially an immortal trapped within a little child's body and she's in love with Ikaris and whatnot, but... other than the betrayal scene, again, I feel that she is underutilized. 

Which brings us to Ikaris. Played by another Game of Thrones alumni, Richard Madden, the alleged leader and blatant Superman-clone Ikaris kind of initially starts off as someone heroic and basically the big punchy-punch brute of the gang, and he's sort of there backing Sersi up while also clearly wanting to get into her pants again. And... and then around two-thirds through the movie, it turns out that Ikaris is actually the villain, completely convinced that their mission from Arishem is divine and being shocked that Ajak and the others would even consider helping humans. 

I do really think that Madden's performance as Ikaris is kind of underappreciated, though, because when I rewatched this movie... you can really see Ikaris trying his best to hide that he's responsible for the death of Ajak and betraying the Eternals, and you can see him just trying to get all the Eternals to just... accept their mission. It would be a bit too easy to write Ikaris as a 'mwa ha, racial superiority, humans are disposable', but the writers and Madden's acting does really portray Ikaris as someone who genuinely believes in what he's doing, who's genuinely conflicted about the choices he has to make, but sees himself as a genuine hero. 

Speaking of Ajak, well, she's dead in the present day. Sersi, Ikaris and Sprite arrive on her dwelling to find her slain and killed by what's apparently the Deviants (it's actually Ikaris) and her death kick-starts the rest of the Eternal globe-trotting tour. The flashbacks do allow the characters under-utilized in the present day -- especially Ajak and Makkari -- to get a bit more screentime, but it's just as well that in this overcrowded movie some of them were written out relatively quickly. Ajak is played by Selma Hayes and she delivers a great performance as the team mom and a wise mentor. Again, after the true nature of the Celestial/Eternal mission is given to them. 

And then we get to my favourite part of the movie, which is just... globetrotting and picking up all the other Eternals. Kingo is probably my favourite of the mid-movie additions. His power of finger-gun-beams might be a bit underwhelming compared to the other Eternals, but Kumail Nanjiani's acting as the movie's comic relief really adds a lot of flavour to what has otherwise been a pretty standard movie. We first see him making a Bollywood play that kind of mocks Ikaris a bit, and I absolutely love so many of his handwaves on just how he has managed to remain as a Bollywood star for 500 years. Kingo gets a lot of great moments trading barbs with the other characters, and honestly kind of steals the spotlight from Sersi and Ikaris at this point?

...which is a massive crying shame that they, for whatever reason, wrote Kingo out of the final act. Kingo was initially supportive of Ikaris, mostly citing that he backs Ikaris's play and that they shouldn't fight against family... but it really kind of feels confused because Kingo hangs out a lot with his (equally adorable) valet Karun Patel. You'd think that Kingo would eventually realize that his bond with his human friends would cause him to return as a last-minute act to save humanity... but nope. Kingo literally disappears from that climax and the movie really wouldn't lose anything by adding him since it's just an action scene... I don't know. It feels like easily the biggest weakness of the movie for me that Kingo just... peters out. 

The next batch of characters we pick up are Gilgamesh and Thena, played by Don Lee and Angelina Jolie respectively, who are... kind of joined at the hip. It's inevitable, I think, that some of the Eternals are introduced in pairs and I really kind of felt like we could've done it for another set of Eternals. Gilgamesh is another pretty flat character, just big, burly, fun, charismatic... and completely devoted to his friend (lover?) Thena. So of course Gilgamesh doesn't last really long. We get his introduction scene and then he dies in the next scene. It's kind of expected that some of the characters die to have some stakes, but... but I really don't think we spent enough time with Gil to really care, I'm sorry. We do get some badass scenes of him and Thena in the flashback fighting that giant bull Deviant, but otherwise he's kind of flat. Fun, but flat. 

And Thena... billed as one of the big-name stars of the movie, Thena just... isn't really all that interesting. She suffers from a disease called Mahd Wy'ry that we see both in the present day and in the past, where she would, like someone with dementia or other real mental illnesses, go absolutely berserk and atack those around her, thinking that she's on another planet and that 'everyone is going to die'. There are a lot of exposition dropped here and there about how some Eternals need to be 'reset' and this is all foreshadowing to the fact that our Eternal characters have been around causing the destruction of planets and stuff. That's pretty cool from a plot standpoint, but Thena herself kind of remains an unfortunately one-note character.

She is pretty cool, and the effects given to her weapons manifesting is some of the best in the movie, but ultimately she just goes around as the quiet, powerful member of the team. She gets a badass moment fighting against Ikaris and later Kro in the climax of the movie, but... y'know, in a movie already so packed with characters, as much as I enjoyed the performance, she's kind of underused. 

And (I'm starting to sound like a broken record now) we get to Druig in the Amazon, and he's... probably the most criminally under-utilized characters... and he got so much focus! Played by Barry Keoghan who delivers so much hurt into Druig's personality, Druig was initially set up both by marketing and by the movie as the obvious evil, slimy bad guy with bad guy powers. He mind-controls people, and clearly sees the humans in his Amazon settlement as more pets than actual people. He is instantly abrasive to Karun and mind-controls him as a dick move to Kingo. In the past, he fought against Ajak's orders when they were not allowed to interfere in a particularly brutal war between humans, seeing that human wars are something they should stop. Between the many storylines in this movie, Druig probably has the most interesting moral quandy.

And... we don't... really get a conclusion to this? The movie sets up his conflict, shows that he's got some pretty good qualities as he actually listens to Sersi or Sprite or whoever telling him to let the humans go (that is a badass moment when he gets the entire village to march out with shotguns to kill a Deviant) but other than being snarky and flirting a lot with Makkari, Druig just kind of peters out. I really felt like we're missing a scene when he gets some sort of conclusion in regards to his views, which are different from all the other Eternals.

Anyway, at this point we get another Deviant attack, which leads to a pretty damn badass sequence. Kingo, Druig and Gilgamesh all get to show their stuff as far as action scenes go. Sersi discovers that her powers have improved that she can now transmute living tissue. And the intelligent Deviant Kro kill Gilgamesh. 

Speaking of which... well, the Deviants ended up feeling like the biggest wastes of time, yeah? I get that they're here to provide big badass CGI monsters for our heroes to pound to the ground, as well as a red herring excuse for Arishem to point and go 'see, this is your totally legit and beneficial mission'. But they tried to adapt a bit too much of the storyline from the comics where the Deviants are actually intelligent, and we kinda-sorta got Kro kind of... hanging around and being this wild card that ends up interfering in the final battle between Thena and Ikaris. Sure, he ends up apparently absorbing Ajak and Gilgamesh's powers, but he really feels more like a roadblock and it all just feels like kind of a huge distraction? I wouldn't be mad if the movie doesn't have like ten other characters to juggle already, but Kro and the Deviants are definitely plot points that could've been resolved at around the halfway point. 

Speaking of which, this is where we meet Phastos, who is relatively prevalent in the flashbacks as being the Eternals' science guy, being all jovial and stuff about wanting to introduce steam engines and whatnot to prehistoric humans... and then we get a flash-cut to him seeing the devastation wrought by human science in the atomic bombs of World War II... and then we cut to him having one of the most well-adjusted families with his gay husband and son. And... again, the representation is nice, but with so many things going on, it feels a bit redundant? It does lead to that IKEA joke (which is funnier in the actual movie than in the trailer version because Phastos gets to curse) and unlike Kingo we actually get to see why Phastos is the way he is. Brian Tyree Henry plays a wonderfully fun character, but, again, that's basically not a complaint for the casting of this movie. He just kind of feels one note...

...but no character feels even more one-note than poor Makkari. The deaf Makkari, played by Lauren Ridloff, does the best with the limited amount of screentime that she's given, but she's barely in the movie, she doesn't get a huge introduction scene like Druig, Kingo, Phastos or the Thena/Gil pair. She's just... hanging out in the Domo, has a couple of cute interactions with Druig... and the rest of the movie she's just in action scenes. Admittedly, Makkari has one of the best showcases of super-speed I've seen in cinema (MCUQuicksilverLOL) but just like Gilgamesh, she really feels like she's there just because they're obligated to. 

And then after some talk of Phastos discovering and theorizing of a way to amplify Druig's powers to put the Celestial Tiamut to sleep with something called the "Uni-Mind", Ikaris reveals his treachery both to the Eternals and the audience. There's a neat bit of conflict similar to the earlier Avengers movies where all the Eternals have their views, and I'm not going to be a dick and say that there's no buildup. It's just that... there's not enough buildup? Ultimately Ikaris betrays the other Eternals, Sprite joins him, Kingo exits the movie and we get Sersi leading the rest of the Eternals in fighting Ikaris. 

To be fair, the actual final battle is pretty cool. The highlights, obviously, are the team-up between Phastos, Makkari and Thena as they dogpile Ikaris who uses his Superman powers to manhandle them. There was a great moment of Makkari screaming when Druig is apparently killed by Ikaris, and as much as I bitch on Kro, it was a good moment for Thena when she breaks free and avenges Gilgamesh. Sprite... well, she sure got stabbed by Druig? I really do feel like she's perhaps a bit too easily forgiven in this movie, and the conclusion of her 'betrayal' was kind of nowhere as satisfying. But when Ikaris ultimately faces Sersi, finds himself still in love with her and unable to kill her, and Sersi activates the Uni-Mind. The visual effects of an island-sized titan rising from the oceans with his head and fingers reaching the clouds is a very cool one to see on-screen, for sure!

Sersi turns Tiamut into marble, Ikaris commits suicide by flying into the sun, and Sersi uses the remaining energy from turning Tiamut into marble to turn Sprite into a human that can grow normally. (It really is just an excuse so they don't have to bother with CGI-ing the fastest-growing actor among the cast IRL).

Then we get the end of the movie. Thena, Druig and Makkari head off on the spaceship to find other Eternals (they do in the mid-credits scene). But as Sersi is about to enjoy some civilian R&R with Dan Whitman, Arishem parts the clouds and appears above Earth, and abducts Sersi, Phastos and Kingo to judge them, trying to see if their murder of a Celestial is worth it. 

And... yeah. It's a very cluttered movie, and I abridged a lot of my summary for this thing. And... in all honesty, I still quite like it a lot. I still feel like it tells a relatively solid story, and for what it's trying to do, it at least managed to deliver a pretty decent story and introduction to the Eternals overall. It's just that it feels so different from the rest of the MCU's fare, and the fact that we really do juggle way too many characters does really hurt the movie's overall pacing. It's not bad the way Age of Ultron is a mess, for sure, but it definitely feels like it's pretty rough. I'm mostly of the opinion that this could've probably worked better stretched out into a full season of a Disney+ show. Overall, though, still a decent movie overall. 

Marvel Easter Eggs Corner:

• Post-Credits Scene: 
• 
  The mid-credits scene is the Eternals in space (Thena, Makkari and Druig) finding out that the Earth-bound Eternals aren't responding. Then, out of a portal, Pip the Troll shows up to introduce Starfox/Eros, an Eternal from Titan and brother of Thanos.
• The post-credits scene is Dane Whitman looking at a mysterious sword and wondering whether he should pick it up to save Sersi, hinting at his comic-book counterpart, the Black Knight. He is stopped by a mysterious voice -- Mahershala Ali's Blade. 
  
• Past Movie Continuity: As with most post-Endgame MCU material, we get an acknowldegement of Thanos's Snap, this time by Dane Whitman to his class, as well as by Ajak (who sees humanity bouncing back from that as the reason the Eternals are wrong). Sprite also brings up the fact that the Avengers' leadership is questionable after the events of Endgame. Dane asks Sersi if she's a 'wizard like Doctor Strange'. Kingo brings up how he met a young Thor in the Battle of Tonsberg, seen in Thor. A banner of the Global Repatriation Council from The Falcon and the Winter Soldier can be seen in London when Sersi is taking pictures. Kingo has Captain America's USO show shield in his private jet's bar. Ikaris theorizes that Phastos's IKEA table is made up of Vibranium (it's not). And, of course, Thanos is mentioned as Eros's brother. 
• Movie Superhero Codenames: Everyone's codenames in the comics are just their real names. The Forgotten One just gets reduced to one of his many names in the comics, though, Gilgamesh. Dane Whitman didn't get to become Black Knight in this movie; and Pip the Troll introduces Eros with his codename, Starfox. 
• Favourite Action Scene: Ikaris versus everybody on the beach. I think my favourite part of that scene is Makkari's no-punches-held rage induced superspeed beatdown. Phastos using his weird-ass machines to hold Ikaris is also pretty fun. 
• Funniest Line: "Like Alfred to Batman!"
• Which brings us to the fact that this Marvel movie actually makes shout-outs to Superman (Phastos's son compares Ikaris to Superman, a not-unreasonable thing to do), and Gilgamesh describes Kingo and Karun's relationship like Batman and Alfred. 
• While the movie mostly focuses on Arishem, in the vision, we get to see Celestials matching up to the comic-book characters Jemiah the Analyzer, Nezarr the Calculator and Hargen the Measurer. 
• Despite what this movie might seem to imply, we actually had the Celestials show up before! Eson the Searcher made a brief cameo as a former wielder of the Power Stone in Guardians of the Galaxy, and Knowhere from that movie is the head of another Celestial. 
• More significantly, Ego the Living Planet from Guardians of the Galaxy 2 is also noted to be a Celestial in the MCU, and he has explicitly been surviving on other life.
• Karun off-handedly mentioning that he thought Kingo is a vampire is probably a stealthy acknowledgement that vampires exist in the MCU, and the voice of one shows up in the post-credits scene.  
• The Eternals' ship is called Domo. In the comics, Domo is another Eternal, a bald one that handles administrative affairs for the Olympian Eternals.
• Phastos' civilian codename is 'Philip'. In the comics, Phastos briefly spent time as the mortal called Philip Stoss.
• Sersi makes a reference to Dane's estranged uncle. In the comics, Dane Whitman's uncle is Nathan Garrett, the villain who held the title of Black Knight before Dane.
• Kro caressing Thena lovingly when he has her under his thrall is a reference to the comics where the two are actually star-crossed lovers from the two warring factions. 
• One of the buildings in London has 'Dark Angel' written on it, a reference to another Eternal character.