The first MCU film I didn’t pretty much much immediately see on release, Eternals is an outlier.
But no more!
It’s odd to see a ‘big’ MCU film like this over six months after release, having seen all the reviews flying around. In Eternals case it received very mixed reviews, and didn’t make the crazy money of many MCU releases. For me, it just didn’t seem that important in the overall scheme of things. I didn’t need to know what happened here to understand No Way Home.
This leads into bigger questions around Phase and a seeming lack of overall direction, but that’s for another time.
Eternals is maddening. With a whole new aspect of the MCU being explored and every character needing some kind of intro, I understand why it’s 156 minutes long. But the first half suffers from horrendously slow pacing, to the point of annoyance. I’m not against a long run time when that time is used effectively. Audiences are very comic literate and understanding at this point, so trust that and lay the big stuff on them. Slowly slowly is just agitating, especially when the ‘twists’ that come later are pretty obvious.
The second half is much more like it, lifting Eternals off the bottom of my MCU rankings. There are some wonderful visuals, with design of the suits in particular impressing me. There’s also a heftier dose of action.
Only a few of the cast have stuck with me a few days later, though the diversity and inclusivity was notable. I did struggle with “so you’re like the Flash but” and “you’re like Superman but not”. But how many cool superpowers are there before you start looking a lot like others? Is superhero proliferation a problem?! At least the aforementioned suits are cool.
Anyway. If you love Eternals, I get it. If you really don’t, I get that too. Annoyingly, I fall firmly in the middle.
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