The reaction to this movie has been a “love it” or “hate it” outcry. I think the dividing line of responses is whether or not it fits the Marvel mega-action template and if that is okay or not. Just to deal with that question out of the gate, this does not fit the Marvel cookie cutter. There are a variety of differences. It is diverse in both casting and subject matter. The cast is international, multinational and multi-ethnic. We have our first openly gay superhero. We have our first hero who is deaf. We have our first hero to struggles with their mental health. All artfully and beautifully presented, in my opinion. This is not a single character’s origin story. It is 10 characters’ origin story spanning over 7,000 years, plus the introduction of 3 distinct and new species: Celestials, Eternals and Deviants. It also acknowledges superheroes from other universes, like the potshots at DC’s Superman. There are also some Marvel staple components, humour, brilliant CGI, fight scenes and world weaving. This film is also beautiful, in its casting, cinematography, graphics and music. The story is rich and the immense timeline is artfully woven into small bites. There is also a deeper treatment of relationships and some mature but tasteful scenes. The draw for me was Marvel and the stellar cast, especially Gemma Chan, whose career I’ve been following for a long time, now (do yourself a favour and binge her filmography). I have to confess that when I left the theatre I wasn’t sure how I felt about the movie. Then, I heard Rotten Tomatoes gave it the lowest of all ratings for a Marvel movie (49%) and the critics who saw early releases were brutal. But, I also read the positive reviews by ordinary theatre goers and in writing this, I’ve decided to give this film an 8 (great) out of 10 and, personally, I look forward to seeing it again. [Superhero Action Adventure]

_Eternals_, the film where Robb Stark and Jon Snow find themselves in a love triangle with Sersi.
Besides that piece of ironic casting, I’m not seeing the hook with this film.
I’ve seen some people arguing that it’s boring because of its slow pace.
It’s not, it’s boring because it’s an empty, big wet fart of a film that doesn’t have one ounce of personality.
It feels like one of those long, drawn out, indulgent college lectures where you’re constantly asking yourself what the point of learning this stuff is, and you’re still not sure by the end of it.
The cinematography is great, it looks like a Denis Villeneuve film with its use of natural light, but that’s pretty much the only thing I can praise about it.
Most of these films are entertaining because of their interesting characters, comedy and ocassionally the action (if it doesn’t look like artificial crap).
This film doesn’t really have characters in the first place.
It tries to balance 10 leads, which results in most of these characters being reduced to archetypes.
Most of them have one or two quirks, but none of them develop into well rounded or engaging characters.
Even some of the acting, which is the one thing these films usually get right, is a little wonky and one note.
It tries to compensate for its lack of action with drama, which I’d welcome if it wasn’t the same, generic ‘monster bad, we have to fight them’ shtick we’ve seen time and time again.
The philosophical questions that it tries to pose feel tacked on and have no meat to them, not unlike a Zack Snyder DC film.
There’s also so much handholding in this, the amount of exposition is kinda insane.
You don’t need to dumb your film down to the point where your exposition dump that starts the film repeats itself two more times during other dialogue scenes.
The third act, as expected nowadays, looks like plastic and is filled with effects that already look dated.
Is it that hard to give us something subversive like Doctor Strange again, and to stop having these fake and obnoxious cgi battles?
Then you wouldn’t have to underpay your visual effects artists to animate a battle for which most people close their eyes during.

There’s still one good thing to come out of this: we can now definitively reject this dumb narrative (which was floating around in some circles) that critics will go easy on a film because of diverse casting, the director being an Oscar favorite, the brand or a film being ‘woke’.
So at least there’s that, though I wouldn’t be surprised if these morons find a way to twist it into their narrative regardless.
I can already see some of them claiming that critics hated it because there wasn’t enough gay sex in it.
Frankly though, I agree: where was the sex scene between Angelina Jolie and Gemma Chan?

3.5/10

When I started watching this picture, I did not expect anything supernatural or something new, and as usual with films from the Marvel film studio, it turned out to be right.

the authors of the script decided not to break the tradition and, as usual, took the path of least resistance, there are heroes, there are villains, they are fighting each other for the fate of all mankind. The plot revolves around the fact that a certain deity sends detachments of superheroes endowed with superpowers to protect intelligent life on different planets from evil predatory creatures remotely resembling ancient lizards, which they almost successfully cope with, but it turns out that the main characters fought absolutely the wrong evil and the main battle they are ahead. The first hour of the film is mostly banal chatter and shots telling about previous events, but towards the end there is an increase in the intensity of events up to an epic massacre of good and evil. The plot does not carry a global mystery and everything is clear from the very beginning, and small plot twists are guessed even before the viewer sees them. And judging by the finale, the audience will be fed one more, and maybe several films on the topic.

It was an ok movie. Just hard for me to get into. The movie is just to hard to fathom as a real possibility. With their powers it's dumb they only can fight the machine things.

I found Eternals to be entertaining in the way I often do with superhero movies: the plot and dialogue were sharp enough to keep me interested enough to watch the whole movie, but it did not hold me in thrall so much that I will be watching it again. Let’s face it: unless we are very intelligent or very beautiful, our role if a Marvel film actually came to life around us would be as helpless victims either saved or killed as collateral damage. Sip we are talking vicarious involvement here. . The only Marvel film I would keep watching any time it comes on is Ant Man and the Wasp, as I find its wit and humor irresistible.

As I watched Eternals, I absorbed what I felt were a couple of plot holes large enough for an eternal to fly through. And I am not talking about the science; I give a lot of leeway to scence fiction and similar genres in order to serve the plot. I mean, they went to the trouble of explaining why the Eternals weren’t around to help out with our boy Thanos, but considering the origin story of the Eternals, I did wonder why there didn’t all have every superpower rather than one each.

Anyway, I will not do a deep dive into how this entry serves the overarching Marvel story arc, because I am not a Marvel fan, per se. (After all, I was a DC comic reader as a young lad!) Suffice to say Eternals did not insult my intelligence as a movie viewer but rather, as mentioned at the outset, held me all the way through it.