What Worked:

First let’s start with the positive, the movie already made headlines before it ever came out with a few big name veteran actresses, Angelina Jolie and Salma Hayek, who though underused each brought a solid performance. Kumail Nanjiani, who played Kingo and Brian Tyree Henry, who played Phastos, both brought much needed humor to their scenes, especially Nanjiani who stole just about every scene he was in. The film was also visually pleasing with beautiful landscaping shots, detailed costume designs, and good use of practical sets. Finally I do appreciate what the movie was striving for, Marvel’s previous two releases (Black Widow and Shang Chi) were low in stakes and thematically not very deep. Eternals asks the audience tough moral questions and I always appreciate a film that forces me to think.

What did not Work:

The problems that Eternals has are the exact same problem that I predicted it would have. When I had heard that Marvel was going to be making a movie about one of their lesser known properties that would feature 10 new characters I immediately began to worry. Introducing 10 characters in any movie and giving each of them a satisfying amount of screen time is tough let alone introducing them into the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which already has so many characters to keep up with. So the biggest problem was there just simply was not enough time. You weren’t allowed to spend enough time with each character. I will leave the spoilers out but it felt like each character started a story arch that seemed interesting and had a lot of potential, but most of them didn’t finished their arches and if they did it felt rushed. For example, the romance between Sersi and Ikiras was meant to be betrayed as one that has stood for thousands of years, there’s a lot to play with story wise with that concept yet we as the audience never feel a personal connection with the couple because we’re merely told this, outside of a few flashbacks we really don’t feel the gravity of their relationship. This is a common theme throughout the movie so unfortunately all your’e left with is a bunch of half baked ideas that never lead to a satisfying ending.

Grade:

I’ve never been a big fan of grading movies because I feel like a simple numeric system is not enough to tell the whole story.

However, if I were to grade Eternals for a friend I would say 6/10.

At the end of the day Eternals is an average Marvel movie, but even an average Marvel movie is an above average movie by most movie standards so I feel like a 6/10 is a fair grade.