HipsterZOMBIEJoint Movie Review: Eternals

So typically I try to keep on top of new movie releases for the website but I just couldn’t bring myself to get out to the theater for this film. For Marvel’s most woke film to date its coincidently also its most sleep inducing. This film was a chore to get through. It wants to be the next Avengers with the aesthetic of Zack Snyder’s Justice League but falls short on both fronts.

Produced by Marvel Studios and distributed by Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures, it is the 26th film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU). The film is directed by Chloé Zhao, who wrote the screenplay with Patrick Burleigh, Ryan Firpo, and Kaz Firpo. It stars an ensemble castincluding Gemma Chan, Richard Madden, Kumail Nanjiani, Lia McHugh, Brian Tyree Henry, Lauren Ridloff, Barry Keoghan, Don Lee, Harish Patel, Kit Harington, Salma Hayek, and Angelina Jolie. In the film, the Eternals, an immortal alien race, emerge from hiding after thousands of years to protect Earth from their ancient counterparts, the Deviants.

The heroes check out the woke boxes. You got your white, black, Indian, deaf, gay, and Asian. What you don’t have however is characters that are particularly memorable. Kingo (played by Kumail Nanjiani) is really the only likable one amongst them. The rest come off an angsty or detached. In fact when it’s revealed what the Eternals are actually ancient synthetics who are heralds for the just as ancient and all powerful Celestials who main goal is to harvest and destroy planets you start to justify in your mind what you thought about these superheroes.

The Eternals are a bunch of assholes.

That and I get the director wanted to be all inclusive but why the hell would the Celestials in all the wisdom and power make a deaf synthetic like Makkari?

Visually the film is beautiful, despite its generic heroes and the even less impressive Deviants who just look like bad CGI monsters from any science fiction film.

The bulk of the film is sadly weighed down with too many flashbacks. As I sat watching the 7th flashback I kept thinking The Eternals would have worked way better as a streaming series than a film.

Zhao does her best to balance the 10 plus superheroes in the film but it just all falls flat. None of these characters are memorable and if Marvel Studios wanted this to be their next Avengers they better think of something else, quick.

Marvel banked on the fact that a relatively obscure comic book series with big name stars like Jolie, Hayek, and some Game of Thrones actors would be enough to excite people but they just don’t. There is no next Spider-Man, Iron Man, or Thor here. Hell, there isn’t even a next Hawkeye.

Eternals felt like an eternity to get through and when it was over nothing about stuck with me at all.

In conclusion, HipsterZOMBIEJoint Experience says take a hard pass on Eternals…