Rating: 2 Stars
The following review contains spoilers.
Overview:
7,000 years ago, a group of superpowered beings called Eternals were sent to Earth by their master, a celestial called Arishem, with the goal of combating a race of monsters called Deviants, before the Deviants could prey upon and wipe out a still developing human race.
500 years ago, the Eternals finally succeeded in wiping out all Deviants, and lacking instruction from Arishem, puttered around on Earth, vowing not to interfere in human affairs until they heard otherwise. But now, present day, the Deviants have somehow returned, and a few of the Eternals — Sersi, Sprite, and Ikaris — decide to travel the globe bringing the group back together to figure out how to deal with this resurfacing threat.
They first go to their leader, Ajak, but find her already dead. The device she used to speak to Arishem is passed to Sersi, but Sersi doesn’t know how to use it. But then, after a bit, she does know how to use it, so that’s not a problem. Arishem tells Sersi that their secret purpose was not merely to fight the Deviants (which were an earlier version of the Eternals that went rogue) but to keep humanity around long enough that their sentient life energy (so different from stupid, useless animal life energy) would grow to a point that it could incubate the celestial egg in the planet’s center, which will soon emerge and kill everyone. The Eternals are just robots or something, and most of their memories are false.
Though apparently they’ve done this many times in the past on other planets and then been rebooted, this time most of the Eternals like humanity too much and decide they must find a way to stop the celestial from hatching before the planet is destroyed. But how?
Best Parts:
If nothing else, Marvel Studios is good at coming up with creative beats in action sequences, like when Sersi turns the ground liquid and then solid again to trap a Deviant, or when Druig takes control of all the humans to have them stand in formation and shoot guns at another Deviant.
Worst Parts:
This movie’s biggest crime is just being boring. It’s very, very long because it has such a large cast to introduce, but still isn’t long enough to make you care about any of them. All their performances feel somewhat wooden, which I guess makes more sense when you find out they’re robots, but Vision is a robot, and he’s rad, so that’s not much of an excuse. After I saw the movie, I was listening to a review of it, and the reviewers mentioned a few times that there were 10 main characters, and I kept thinking, that can’t be right! There couldn’t have been more than seven or so! But then, look at that poster, there really are 10 of these doofuses.
When Sersi’s boyfriend, the coincidental future super-guy Dane Whitman, asks her why the Eternals didn’t do anything about Thanos or like, World War II, she said they were sworn never to interfere in humanity’s development, only to fight the Deviants. But if the true goal of Arishem was just to get the human population up as high as possible, wouldn’t using their tech to stop the black plague or various genocides or whatever totally be within their mission statement?
Speaking of coincidences, the reemergence of the Deviants that brings the Eternals back together is not related to the imminent celestial birth. It’s just a thing that happens to call them back together for the first time in 500 years, just a few days before an even more important thing.
Considering they had spent 500 years in limbo with nothing to fight and no instructions from their god, Arishem, the central moral conflict of whether to be loyal to said god or to prevent the destruction of humanity feels very flat. And then the central physical conflict of how to actually stop it is kind of brushed over, when Sersi, who previously couldn’t use her transmutation powers on living things, is now suddenly able to use it on living things, and so she just does that. It doesn’t really seem that hard in the end (I know they formed the “Uni-Mind”, but also, whatever) and it doesn’t feel like it costs them that much (outside of sad Ikaris killing himself by flying into the sun — maybe a bit of an overreaction).
Of course they had to figure out how to explain why the child Eternal, Sprite, who hasn’t aged in 7,000 years, would look very different if they ever put her in a movie again, but using residual Uni-Mind power to turn her from an alien robot into literally a human being is kind of idiotic.
Superhero Movies Ranked 