I finally caved and watched Marvel’s Eternals with my wife. I expected it to be nothing more than a bunch of woke nonsense that was terrible. I was pleasantly surprised to realize it wasn’t terrible; just really bad.
What’s really sad is that it’s not the wokeism that makes so terrible. It’s that the writing fails to deliver a gripping story. Now, I don’t watch movies expecting them to add to my knowledge or make me think. I watch them to be entertained. If I want to experience a story that will make me think deeply about the world I’ll read a book.
The core of the problem is that Eternals was not entertaining, but neither did it try to deliver some moral message. The movie could’ve leaned into the message that life is valuable and worth defending, but it didn’t. It only offered a few half-hearted nods towards that at the end. If it wasn’t Marvel and I hadn’t anticipated writing this, I might have turned it off without finishing.
My wife described it as “meh.”
To appropriately critique the movie though will require spoilers. Consider yourself warned if you keep reading.
**Spoilers**
I’ll start by pointing out the plot holes and poor writing.
The biggest plot holes is that Arishem, the god-king(?) of the celestials, made a spaceship for the 10 Eternals. So since he can make spaceships and since celestials need intelligent life around them to grow, why not just have an intelligent race become nomads that help celestials reach maturity and leave?
It’s all a cycle, but a cycle without purpose. Now, perhaps in the comics there is a purpose, but the failure to explain that purpose well in the movie is head-scratching.
Also, the team has horrible chemistry. They’ve been together for thousands of years fighting deviants, and yet there are only a few friendships. It makes it all feel a little contrived.
There are two instances before the finale where the film tries to emphasize the value of life. (Which is somewhat funny considering that in today’s political climate, valuing life is not woke but instead a conservative value.) Perhaps the biggest reason it fails is that there is no real emotional weight. The scenes that are supposed to show empathy for humans are too short and not explicative enough. Less jumping around to different times and more grounded storytelling was needed.
In the first instance, Druig mind controls a bunch of soldiers in Tenochtitlan because of the killing. I understand the conquistadors committed a lot of atrocities in South America. But I really could care less about what they did to the Aztecs. The Aztecs were all about human sacrifice and their culture deserved to be wiped off the face of the earth for it.
The second instance is when Phastos is heartbroken by the use of nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The use of nuclear weapons was horrific. But it’s nowhere near any of the terrible atrocities committed over the last 100 years. Hitler killed 11 million people in camps and the communists in Russia and China purged and killed close to 100 million. Plus, we should probably be thankful that nuclear weapons were used at the end of a war and were of such low power compared to the weapons that followed. Can you imagine if nuclear weapons were developed in the 40’s but no one used them until the 70’s or 80’s? The doctrine of MAD - mutually assured destruction - is exactly that: mad. But despite its insanity it prevented war between nuclear powers for seventy years. Now, as long as nobody sneezes too hard in Ukraine, it will continue to do so.
All the diversity in the movie suffers from being unexplainable. It could’ve been done in a cool way that added to the story, but it wasn’t. It’s like they had a list of boxes to check with no regard to how it could be utilized as an asset. Naturally, they tried to make diversity an asset in marketing but that resulted in as much bad press as good.
Overall, Eternals suffers from a failure to deliver a clear, entertaining storyline and has mixed moral messaging. It tries to do too much and fails at all of it.