Marvel Reviews: Eternals

I made my first trip to a movie theater after two years of staying home to watch the new Eternals movie, so I thought I’d give a quick review.

Eternals

Rating: C-

The Eternals movie seems like a good opportunity to mention a modification I may need to make my movie ranking system. (Full explanation of my ranking system is here.) See, I know a lot of people freak out when I rank a movie as C (Average,) because common opinion is that “average” means “bad”. Or if I rank something as C, it means I didn’t like it.

But actually I kind of like Eternals. I will probably watch it again when it hits the streaming services. I just recognize that it’s not really an important film. It’s competently made. Well, mostly competent. I did have to give it a minus for a couple flaws. But there’s really no reason to either recommend or recommend against seeing it. It’s just a movie.

The flaws are that the film drags in places and lacks enthusiasm in others. Plus, one actor issue I’ll mention later. The film really needs to be short or at least move along quicker.

Further thoughts:

• Too many new main characters for one film, so we really don’t get a feel for any of them.
• Rather than cut some of the characters, I think this really should have been two movies.
  • First movie focuses on the apparent threat from the Deviants and only involves Ajak, Sersi, Ikaris, Sprite, Gilgamesh, and Thena. It ends with Sersi contacting Arishem.
  • Second movie adds Kingo, Druig, Phastos, and Makkari, and explores more about Kro while also switching to the Emergence plotline.
• Splitting it into two movies allows us to explore more about Sersi, who seems to be our POV character in the film, but we really don’t get to know her well enough. All of the characters are treated pretty superficially, and only Sprite, Kingo, Phastos and Thena really stand out.
• Most reviewers, even if they give the movie a thumbs down, say the entire cast does a great job. I have to rewatch the film because I had a very different feeling: I kept thinking the Druig character was a pretty poor performance. Maybe I missed something.

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