Eternals (***)
In which an immortal family decides to start killing babies
Fiercely ambitious but perhaps too confident in the payoff it promises, Eternals is a bit of a slow start to the newest team in the MCU.
Let me preface what I’m about to say by emphasizing that I don’t claim to be an expert writer. I’ve never written for a multimillion-dollar film before, so my experience may not be very relevant in this matter. But a few years ago I was commissioned to write an origin story for a comic book series about superpowered dogs. I was originally asked to work with seven lead characters for a three-issue story arc. One of the biggest changes I pushed for was decreasing that number from seven to five. I argued that we wanted the readers to get to know our characters – and the less time they had with each one, the more forgettable each would be. I even pushed to make two of the five characters siblings, which was a quick and easy way to flesh out the relationships without having to spend too much time on it.
Let’s jump to 2012’s The Avengers, which had five critical characters (Iron Man, Captain America, Thor, Hulk, and Loki) and a number of slightly-less-critical characters that still mattered a lot (Nick Fury, Black Widow, Hawkeye, and Phil Coulson). What made that film so exciting was that we knew who each of these characters were. The movie didn’t have to spend too much time introducing any of them – instead, it got straight into showing them working together. If that film had been the first film in the MCU, I have little doubt that it wouldn’t have worked to the extent that it did. And a big part of that is because the leg work had already been completed.
To that end, Eternals has almost certainly bitten off more than it could chew. Eternals gave us ten major characters to worry about: Ajak, Sersi, Ikaris, Kingo, Sprite, Phastos, Makkari, Druig, Gilgamesh, and Thena. Not only is ten a really big number to deal with, not one of them are familiar to the audience. It’s not as though we know three of them and are meeting the rest. Every single one of these characters are brand-spanking new. That’s a lot of work the writers have to do. I’m not saying it’s impossible – just that it’s incredibly ambitious.
The film certainly works hard to help us learn about these characters, and one of the most fun parts of the movie is how we get to see the role the Eternals have played throughout history. We’re taken from ancient Babylon to the destruction of the Aztec empire to World War II, and each moment in time is really intriguing in the way it ties into the lore of the Eternals. The drawback is we never feel like we’re speeding towards a conclusion, because we’re stuck in the past. It’s like how in Skyrim and other RPGs you click through the dialogue as fast as you can to get to the actual mission.
Then there’s the actual mission to consider. It seems as though the Celestials have planted a baby Celestial inside the Earth, and the baby is just waiting for the population to get big enough for it to burst forth. It’s absolutely not the baby Celestial’s fault that Earth would be destroyed in the process. If anything, the perspective of the Celestials makes a lot of sense. If I had to kill two million – heck, two billion – ants in order to have another child, I don’t think I’d lose any sleep. Neither, it seems, would the Celestials. Planets like ours are a dime a dozen to them, and it’s the Celestials who seem to be responsible for creating planets with life in the first place. I get that it’s a movie about humans, so we have to fight for our right to exist, but it never became obvious to me that either the Father Celestial or the Baby Celestial were inherently evil.
At first, it seems like the Eternals are looking for a way to keep the baby asleep instead of waking up to blow up the planet. But by the end of the film, it seems as though they’ve straight-up killed the baby Celestial. Sure, they saved the planet. But they killed this perfectly innocent super-giant. How does that make you the hero?
If and when a sequel comes out, I think it’s clear that there’ll need to be a major shift in the storytelling style. Although Eternals didn’t suck, it didn’t feel enough like a superhero movie. It’s not that it had to be more fun – it’s just that it needed to get where it was going a bit faster, I think. Maybe I’ll change my mind when I watch this for a second time. But until then, I’m going to have to say skip this.