Eternals 2021
Eternals has been getting beat up pretty badly by critics, so I went in with fairly low expectations, but still wanted to see this latest Marvel installment. It is a very different movie, but similar to Shang Chi and Black Widow, in that it has hardly anything to do with the rest of Marvel and ultimately just sets up a whole new tangent for Marvel to make tons more movies. The movie introduces several very powerful types of aliens fighting to destroy or save Earth. The problem is Earthlings don’t have much of a role here, so it is just these mysterious aliens that we don’t really understand, doing things for reasons we don’t really understand, except of course we all want Earth to be saved. The Eternals are the main characters, long-living guardians of Earth who look just like people. There are eight or so of them, which means they don’t always get a lot of screen time. None of them seem to understand things more than the audience does. So it is all kind of abstract. Because these are new characters, there are at least some real consequences here instead of giant battles where nobody gets hurt. There are scenes at the end (including the bitter end of the credits) that set up more things to come, but at this point I feel like we aren’t really getting anywhere, just setting up more setups. It is a neat movie to watch, though a little slow and hard to understand. The characters, are given some real qualities but mostly are just okay, but the plot is too heavily dependent on a bunch of space magic.
Written: 05 Nov 2021
Owned on: Digital