“Eternals” Review: So Much Time, So Little to Say

By: Aidan Arthur

“Eternals,” the newest addition to the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), is a film so full of content that there’s no room for it to succeed. With a dizzying ensemble of characters new to the screen, much of this movie feels like an overcrowded party, leaving the viewer trying to catch people’s names and struggling to remember their stories.

The movie begins auspiciously enough. But the group of characters the viewer is supposed to care about grows, the pace becomes plodding, and the ancient backstory develops concurrently with the present-day action. By the halfway point of this two hour and 37 minute ordeal, I was ready to leave.

There were laughs, but few were more enthusiastic than those sparked by the Diet Coke commercial before the movie began. Moments designed to be shocking were so convoluted and slow that no dramatic realizations hit, instead causing anti-climactic head-scratching as the next scenes began.

By comparison, Infinity War’s 2:29 runtime—and even the full three hours of Endgame—flew by. The tension of dozens of prior films propelled them forward and carried the audience along. But now that the so-called “Infinity Saga” has come to an end, “Eternals” made me feel the true length of two-and-a-half hours.

“Eternals” reaches for higher significance, yet its big questions about the value of humanity are beginning to feel tired, and it fails to even make a compelling argument for saving Earth. In a universe that exists only because of the sacrificial process that births Celestials, why disrupt the process? Rather than truly explore the question, the movie takes the unstated answer a priori and makes the one Eternal who opposes it a villain who destroys himself as penance.

Review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes ranks “Eternals” incredibly low among the movies comprising the MCU, with a critic rating of 48%. This also makes it the first to receive a “rotten” score of below 50%—the next-worst is the much-hated “Thor: The Dark World” at 66%.

“Eternals” is one of three Marvel films released in 2021 so far, and a fourth (“Spider- Man: No Way Home”) will be released on Dec. 17. This will be the first year to see four MCU movies released, in part due to COVID disruptions. Alongside these films, Marvel has released five new miniseries on Disney+.

Of all this new content, the second lowest Rotten Tomatoes score was for “Black Widow,” which earned a 79%. This seems to indicate that “Eternals” is more a one-off disappointment than a portent of a decline in Marvel’s films.

The box office numbers reflect this, too. “Black Widow” and “Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings,” Marvel’s two other features this year, are both in the bottom half of the chart of MCU films. “Eternals,” however, is in a class of its own as the third-worst-performing out of the 26, beating only “Ant-Man” and “The Incredible Hulk.”

It is hard to compare these numbers to blockbusters that came out before COVID. Variety reports that the US domestic box office was down 81% from 2019 as of July. Nevertheless, “Eternals’” weak performance in comparison to other 2021 entries suggests that the movie’s unpopularity isn’t just among critics.

Nevertheless, fans continue to wonder how Marvel will continue to adapt to a post-Thanos universe. Once half the population of the universe has been wiped out, where is there to go? Saving the planet hardly feels like more than a typical Friday afternoon.