Now, Eternals has arrived in the MCU, and if you didn't know better, you could easily mistake it for a DC film. And so far, at least, it seems to have produced DC-like results: critics are generally pretty down on it, it still pulled in good box office numbers despite the reviews, and fans are somewhat divided (though even the supporters' responses seem to be mostly in the "it's pretty not bad, I guess").
Well, put me in the detractors camp. I found Eternals to be the one thing the MCU has avoided being in a long time -- boring. And the "half life" on the movie has been brief indeed, as my general boredom while I was watching it has shifted into something closer to contempt the more I think about what I saw (which hasn't been often).
The Eternals is an incredibly dour movie. In focusing on characters who live for millennia, who are instructed to place themselves "above it all," the story itself winds up feeling at a similar remove: monotonous and uninteresting. MCU movies often devolve into a CG spectacle at the end (with the effectiveness of that depending on how well the characters were drawn in the first two acts). Eternals drowns in CG from beginning to end. The monsters, meant to be alien, come off lifeless -- and the fact that the heroes are literally fighting them with finger guns and quasi-intangible weaponry gives the whole thing the feeling of children pretending in the backyard (with a similar level of coherence).
There is comic relief in this movie, but it's quite sparse. The characters who might be said to be having the most fun are also generally the ones with the least screen time. And even many of the fun characters seem to be more defined by their angst. Kumail Nanjiani's Kingo is kind of an exemplar for a lot of what's wrong here; Nanjiani is actually pretty funny in most of his scenes, and a welcome pressure release valve on the film. But why did he have to get ridiculously jacked to play this part? Because in this movie, everyone has to be just That Serious.
It's not just about whether the right amount of comic relief is here, though. In fact, it's more about the emotional stakes not really landing. Recently at the movies, you might just as easily accuse Dune of being a dour movie with very little comic relief. But where some people have pointed to Rebecca Ferguson's Jessica as a weak spot of the movie (because the character gets quite emotional relative to anyone else), I feel like her swinging for the dramatic fences generates most of the stakes. There's very little of that in Eternals; the characters played by Angelina Jolie, Gemma Chan, Richard Madden, and Salma Hayek are the ones largely freighted with the emotional stakes. Yet while I've seen every one of them act effectively in other things, they're quite lifeless and dry here. (Yes, even Gemma Chan, whose best known performance before this, as an "emotionless" android in Humans, is far more moving.)
I did appreciate the use of the character of Phastos, the much-touted gay character in this movie whose sexual identity actually isn't marginalized in the story. (Indeed, his attachment to his family offers up pretty much the only effective emotional stakes in the movie.) I also applaud the diversity here among this large new cast of characters. Indeed, generally, I appreciate the idea that they tried to do something here that wasn't simply copy-pasting the MCU formula. But I generally haven't liked the DC superhero movies, and I didn't like this one either.
I walked out of the theater thinking I'd been quite bored, and for quite a long run time. I wasn't necessarily thinking that I'd just seen the worst MCU movie. But when I pulled up Flickchart and added Eternals to my list, that's where it landed: dead last in the franchise. I give Eternals a D.
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