Eternals

by Hans A. Carpenter
Release Date: November 5
Director: Chloe Zhao
Starring: Gemma Chan, Richard Madden,
and Angelina Jolie
Mister Marquee Says: Booooooring
Number: 2.5/5
The Eternals, a race of super powered, ageless beings, are sent to Earth by the Celestials and instructed to protect it from the Deviants while not interfering with human affairs.
I have such mixed feeling about Eternals. On one hand, director Chloe Zhao tries to take Marvel in a direction that feels totally different. She flirts with lofty themes, and I can’t help but applaud the ambition.
On the other hand, this movie is really boring and goes on forever. The Eternals may have all the time in the world, but I don’t. When an hour and a half into this flick the whole team still isn’t put together, it becomes clear what a chore Eternals is to get through. This isn’t coming from someone with a short attention span. In my last review, I heaped praise on Dune and that movie took two and a half hours to tell half a story.
The thing is, that story was interesting. Those characters were interesting. Zhao tries to make a compelling story for her characters. The actors do what they can. It just isn’t enough. Then again, what are you supposed to do with a property that boils down to “sexy god beings sit on their keisters for 10,000 years and may or may not do stuff”? Their whole existence revolves around the Deviants who actually seem to matter less than every other army of generic CGI monsters we’ve gotten from the MCU over the last decade.
Nobody bats 1,000, not even the studio that made a pop culture icon out of a talking tree with the vocabulary of a Pokémon. Eternals would have been much more watchable with an 45 min- one-hour cut off. Is this the worst MCU movie? I have a hard time saying it’s worse than forgettable entries like Thor 2, the Iron Man sequels or Captain Marvel, but it definitely is the biggest chore to finish.