Eternals: Ignore The Anti-Hype, Please.

**NO SPOILERS FOR ETERNALS, BUT SPOILERS FOR PREVIOUS MCU MOVIES APPEAR WITHIN. YOU'VE BEEN WARNED.**

For the third time this calendar year, Marvel gifts us with a long-delayed movie, and this time, it's rather unusual this time in that we also have the first officially "Rotten" MCU movie on Rotten Tomatoes, earning only 48% at the time of this writing. Well, I'm here to tell you that in a world where the likes of Thor: The Dark World exist, and where Amazing Spider-Man 2 is also rated "Rotten," such classification is seriously misleading about Marvel's latest. It ain't a perfect movie, but it keeps up pretty well with Marvel tradition - stunning visuals, all-star casting, a left-field choice of director previously known more for low-budget and/or indie fare (and while Chloé Zhao is a well-deserved Oscar winner now, it still feels like quite the leap from Nomadland to Eternals), and an increasing commitment to diversity of talent before and behind the camera.

Ten supers, one poster. Pretty solid dramatis personae for a non-Avengers MCU movie.

Those delicate gold lines all over this poster are every bit as much a star of the movie as the people playing our titular team - they're essential to this movie's aesthetic, looking like an even sunnier variation on the magic produced by Doctor Strange, which itself looked like a magical variation of Stark's ubiquitous holographic displays. These design languages coalesce best as shown by Phastos and his engineering talents, drumming up displays for his technological plans for the team and for humanity in general. But they also help unify the designs of the powers for every single member of the team - the speed trails of Makkari, Thena's delicate-looking blades, Ikaris's eye beams, Kingo's guns for hands, Gilgamesh's gauntlets. Sprite's invisibility and camouflage...but especially Sersi, the real star of our show, who can transmute any inanimate object into another. (Her human boyfriend remarks how every time they're together, the water turns into coffee, but that's just the tip of the iceberg with her powers, as you'll see by the end of this movie. No spoilers, though.)

As unique as the movie's primary aesthetic is, it also owes a lot to the celestial side of classic Marvel - it's based on a Jack Kirby comic line, after all, and it shows in its depiction of the enormous Celestial, Arishem, who looms larger than life in his few appearances throughout the movie. Those appearances make the movie's strongest visual impressions, utterly dwarfing whichever Eternal is leader and gets to talk directly to him, and help give the movie a scale not previously seen in any Marvel movie to date. Time is also a scale that Zhao expands beyond the scope of any Marvel predecessor, as the movie toggles between present day and frequent flashbacks to ancient and medieval times (the flashbacks being in chronological order and exposing the downfall that led to the ultimate breakup of the team before the resurgence of their ancient enemies, the Deviants, in the present day.) And over the course of that time, Zhao brings up all manner of intellectual questions, allegories about religion and politics and economy and our society in general. While it's easy to mock the Eternals for having essentially sat out the events of the MCU to date (even the trailers demand an answer to this question), it ultimately becomes clear that deep personal conflicts and regrets tore the team apart, and continue to do so to this day. 

It's a testament to the skills of the ensemble cast that many of them are able to play the same character with multiple iterations, to the point where they come off as playing two different characters. Of note, of course, is Angelina Jolie as Thena, a formidable warrior in ancient times (and the inspiration for the Greek goddess Athena in-universe) but visibly broken by her trauma in the present day (her symptoms resemble multiple psychiatric disorders including PTSD, and at one point she tells a child that she gets "confused.") Richard Madden is also a most complicated Ikaris, a massively powerful fellow, but brought down by jealousy when Gemma Chan's Sersi (the true star of the movie, she's on her second distinct MCU character - having previously played the minor role of Minn-Erva in Captain Marvel - for a reason!), his former lover, is selected as the next Eternals leader. 

Unfortunately, not all the different sides of these actors' range make for a great movie - Kumail Nanjiani in particular comes to mind here. While Kingo is a weapon-handed powerhouse (if underwritten as a character) in the past, his present-day self (a Bollywood star who's had a near-century on the job, presenting himself as a family dynasty of actors when it's all the same person) is an annoying fame-hound who drags along his loyal (and ridiculously obsequious) valet, Karun, to film the next act of the movie as a documentary that none of his fellow Eternals wish to take part in. (Karun, to his credit, is crazy prepared with backup cameras upon backup cameras for each time the Eternals smash them, whether in a battle scene or because they're just so sick and tired of the in-universe paparazzi.) In any case, present-day Kingo really could have been written out of the film entirely and it wouldn't have made one lick of difference on the plot, other than removing some extremely jarring meta-humor that feels like it was tacked on in reshoots and doesn't fit the movie's tone at all. (Not to mention, I would honestly not be surprised if some Indian and other South Asian viewers found Karun offensive, rather than the clearly intended comic relief.) 

But if any other character deserved the amount of spotlight that Kingo gets, it really should've been the mysterious Druig and his mind-control powers (which give him a certain gray morality, even more than any of the other characters in the movie), or Makkari, the speedster, who is deaf and communicates entirely in sign language (which all the other Eternals know, though she can also feel the vibrations of their voices if they speak out loud to her), but is also terribly underwritten and has the least presence in the present day scenes by far. And then there's Brian Tyree Henry doing a terrific performance as technician-in-residence Phastos, who morphs from excitable techno-geek as he's brainstorming ways to improve the farming techniques of ancient Mesopotamia (Babylon and its Hanging Gardens are actually built around the Eternals' ship) to a down-to-earth family man in the present day, trying to raise a human son along with his human husband. While previous Marvel movies danced around the identities of major gay and bi characters, this time the studio has finally refused to edit that out for various foreign markets - which is really unfortunate when a single kiss between two men gets the movie banned in several Arab countries, on top of already being banned in China for the second time in a row for the MCU due to Chloé Zhao (and Simu Liu before her) criticizing the Communist Party as it deserves.

It's a crying shame that after months, if not years, of critics starting to wonder when Marvel will try something a little more new, they just pooh-pooh it when they do. But from what I'm seeing so far, fans are loving it, the studio is all in to support it, and from me, I'll be giving this movie an A- and eagerly awaiting where these characters go from here. And maybe, just maybe, wishing to see the two major new characters teased in the mid- and post-credits scenes - the former, though, is someone I absolutely did not see coming. (Sadly not Quicksilver, though. Not yet.)

Till next time, Pinecones...

#FeedTheRightWolf

Remember: Denis Leary is always watching. Always.