Marvel Studios’ Eternals is based on an idea Jack Kirby had, after he’d already left Marvel Comics to create The New Gods for DC Comics, only to have that and other titles cancelled by the company. The “elevator pitch” is that some Chariots Of The Gods-type aliens experimented on prehistoric humans, creating the evolved Eternals and warped Deviants, and charged them with stewardship of the Earth. Of course, the two groups had different ideas on how to do that, and the battles between the two allegedly led to the development of human myths like Odysseus vs. Circe, Herakles vs. The Hydra, and Thor vs. The Midgard Serpent.
The problem being that Marvel Comics already had Thor, and Hercules, and a bunch of other deities in the modern world playing superhero, and Thor’s pantheon at least has already been introduced in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Not only that, the MCU, huge and involved as it is, is only part of the huge realm of intellectual properties Marvel Comics developed over the years. With the possible exception of Sersi (the Circe of the Odyssey analog), the Eternals have never been as popular with Marvel Comics fans as the Inhumans, let alone the X-Men. So the existence of The Eternals poses a meta-fiction question: Why do we need them? As in, what purpose do they serve in the setting that isn’t already fulfilled by other characters? And in terms of the MCU’s recent narrative, you inevitably get to the question: If these guys were here all along, why didn’t they help the Avengers fight Thanos?
As it turns out, while a certain Eternal claims to be a brother of Thanos, and the disappearance and reappearance of half Earth’s population causes one Eternal to make a critical decision about the group’s mission on Earth, the matter of recent MCU history is mostly waved off. Eternals focuses mainly on the aforementioned Sersi (Gemma Chan, who actually played a Kree in the Captain Marvel movie). Sersi is currently living in London, with her boyfriend, professor Dane Whitman (Kit Harrington, whose character is just as out of his depth here as Jon Snow). However they soon deal with the return of Sersi’s former lover, the Eternals’ main warrior, Ikaris (Richard Madden, who’s not as cool here as he was playing Robb Stark). In flashbacks, Sersi and Ikaris are shown coming to Earth, guiding civilization, falling in love and even getting married, but the reason they broke up isn’t made clear at first. It turns out Ikaris left Sersi due to a major plot twist that I will not reveal to anyone who hasn’t already seen the movie, because it counts for such drama as Eternals has.
I haven’t fully decided what I think about this movie, or even if it’s a good movie. I also don’t know if it’s a bad movie. It is of course extremely long, partially because of the time scope and also because there are no less than ten principals. At the same time, Dane Whitman (who is a notable character in Marvel Comics) is introduced at the beginning and then hardly used at all until the last scenes. In the source material, Deviants were distinct individuals with their own love-hate relationships with Eternals, and in this movie most of them are just giant CGI effects. The Eternals use American-style slang when hanging around the Babylonians and Gupta Indians, and yet Kingo (Kumail Nanjiani) and his mortal valet are the only characters who have the sense of humor one comes to expect from Marvel heroes.
In fact, given the generally negative reviews for Eternals, it now seems to be fashionable for critics to bash Marvel Studios for a standard, mechanical approach to film making, but if anything the problem with Eternals is that it’s not enough like a standard Marvel movie. Deviants aside (and ultimately, they’re kind of a red herring) there is no real Good vs. Evil conflict. There is no easy resolution. Chloe Zhao (the award-winning director of Nomadland) has presented a story of genuinely cosmic scope, posing the question of whether individual human lives really matter against the greater cycle of universal creation and destruction. It isn’t a question with an obvious objective answer, and the Eternals ultimately do not all agree. Eternals intends to be deep, and sometimes succeeds. But all this means that, as with Black Widow, it’s basically a separate story that just happens to take place in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and so the formula, mechanical approach to putting all the Marvel Comics Easter eggs into a continuing narrative are (like Dane) done as afterthoughts or saved for the now-standard after-credits scenes.
Although in that regard, Harry Styles is the greatest stunt casting since David Bowie playing Pontius Pilate.