Eternals
Year: 2021
Rating: PG-13
Length: 156 minutes / 2.60 hours
With two competing comic book companies making movies, it’s interesting to see how a movie like The Avengers (2012) works, but Justice League (2017) doesn’t. You would think that Marvel would have the wisdom to learn from DC’s mistakes, but instead, we see many of these same errors cropping up in Eternals (2021). Perhaps this is a side-effect of an extremely intertwined cinematic universe that requires each player in a larger multi-movie arc to receive an “origin story” movie before being brought into a larger cast of characters (much like Shang-chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (2021)).
Part of what made Justice League fail was how it introduced too many characters at once. In Eternals, there’s a group of superheroes whose numbers rival later Avengers casts, but with no time to get to know any of them significantly well in an already long runtime. That the Snyder cut of Justice League spent four hours to remedy this indicates the problem here. Furthermore, Eternals feels disconnected from the MCU. They could have easily connected a few moments to Infinity War (2018) but glossed over these plot holes without so much as a shrug.
I will give Marvel credit for trying something a little more artistic here. Choosing Chloe Zhao—of Best Picture-winning Nomadland (2020) fame—to helm this project was a bold move. The spacious visuals almost feel alien despite these events taking place on Earth. The scale of the action demands this approach, which works well considering how easily they can be ignored in other MCU movies to come. And while some might fault this movie for being “inclusive,” I appreciated how such a diverse set of people weren’t so homogenous as to remove any internal group friction or drama—which would definitely be present with so many cultures represented here.
An ambitious project that didn’t learn from its competitors, I give Eternals 3.0 stars out of 5.
