Is the Eternals Really the Worst Marvel Movie?
The Eternals. Image courtesy of Disney.
I am not going to sit here and argue that The Eternals, the latest film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, was a good movie. But it was certainly an interesting movie. And even though it is currently the lowest-rated Marvel film, it’s definitely not the worst Marvel movie. It’s not even the worst Marvel movie that came out this year. The Eternals is long. It’s ambitious. It’s not very well-known outside of hardcore comic book nerd circles. And it attempts to tell a long story with a convoluted mythology that spans thousands of years, and involves space-dwelling planet gods. I can understand how some people got lost along the way.
It also seems, and I have seen other critics make this comment, that the film is somewhat at odds with itself. It’s got an art house director, Chloé Zhao, and it seems at times like it’s fighting against itself to tell this mind-bending cosmic story, dipping into some very high-concept sci-fi territory. But at the same time, it is a cog in the Disney Marvel franchise money-machine, and so it can’t stray too far from the kind of staid, boilerplate stuff that mass audiences feel comfortable with. it already went out on a limb with its treatment of sex (although both scenes were cut in the version I saw because of where I saw it), and then it went out again on a narrative limb with a sprawling cast who jump around in time, but who, at the end of the day, still show up at the film’s climax to unite and battle the Bad Guy using cosmic space beams or some shit.
There’s a bit of a disconnect there, in the impulse to tell an actually pretty interesting story about immortal bagmen tricked into doing (unethical?) work for space-beings that may or may not be gods. But at the same time, the story needs to serve its corporate masters. Ever since the Guardians of the Galaxy, Marvel has been letting its films get weirder and quirkier, but only up to a point. You still need to bring it home with a good old fashioned CGI Space Beam.
Anyway, given all that, I thought the movie juggled all the parts pretty well. There is a LOT to fit in here, even with the long runtime. But the pacing is good. The overall structure, wherein a couple key characters get the old team back together again interspersed with flashbacks, is functional and it does the job. I don’t know why the film introduces two Bad Guys. I’ve been noticing this more and more with blockbusters these days. Instead of just focusing on a showdown between the Hero and A Single Bad Guy, and developing the stakes between them, films are increasingly just chucking a whole bunch of bad guys in (see Wonder Woman 1984). Then neither Bad Guy really gets the chance to shine, and the whole thing feels bloated and unsatisfying.
That happens in The Eternals. There is actually a really interesting idea floated about these monsters that hunt intelligent life, and one of them starts absorbing the power (and the intelligence) of the Good Guys. That could have gone in a neat direction, but it didn’t and was obvious they only introduced this character because they needed some CGI filler fights and felt the other main antagonist (a volcano giving birth to a giant head) wasn’t enough to carry the movie. Well, I disagree with that choice but a lot of the other choices made along the way were pretty good all things considered. So no, to answer the question all of the world has been wondering: The Eternals is not the worst Marvel movie. Not by a long shot.
