A Marvel Misfire
How “Eternals” Forgot What Makes the Marvel Cinematic Universe Tick
It was bound to happen one of these days: with Eternals, Marvel Studios has finally made a movie that I actively dislike.
That’s not to say that I’m necessarily enthralled by each and every previous chapter in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Some of these now more than two dozen films – like, say, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings or Captain Marvel – don’t particularly enthuse me, but for the most part I still find them entertaining enough. (Even relative duds such as Thor: The Dark World get by on the charisma of lead actors like Chris Hemsworth and Tom Hiddleston.) More importantly, at an elemental level these movies appear to understand that the success of the entire Marvel cinematic enterprise rests almost entirely on the basic humanity of the deeply flawed characters we see up on the big screen and the integrity of the moral journeys we embark upon with them.
Unfortunately, Eternals forgets what makes the MCU work in the first place. That’s partly to the movie’s source material and subject matter. As the sociologist Gabriel Rossman noted on Twitter, the psychedelic vistas drawn by renowned artist Jack Kirby in the 1970s may well be gorgeous “but space gods battling the cosmos inspires no empathy.” A tale of immortal superbeings attempting to stop the near-divine creators of the universe from destroying the Earth to give birth to a new member of their kind (it’s very, very weird), the movie forges few if any emotional bonds with its audience and gives them no reason to care about the fate of its undeveloped protagonists.
In effect, Eternals runs against the grain of the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe and its underlying ethos. It characters fail to connect on a basic emotional level, and the film as a whole lacks the basic sense of humanity that its twenty-five predecessors shared. For a movie predicated on saving humanity from the capricious depredations of quasi-deities, Eternals holds humanity in a sort of strange contempt.
This disdain that starts with the crackpot ancient aliens theories first adapted by Kirby for his Eternals comic book series way back in the 1970s – humanity’s apparently just too dull to figure out, say, the plow without the help of enlightened extraterrestrials or come up with myths and other fictional narratives not based on them – but the contempt for humanity Eternals displays goes well beyond this absurd narrative conceit. It’s never clear why any of the Eternals actually give a damn about humanity; we’re told, for instance, not shown, that Salma Hayek’s Eternal leader Ajak wants to save Earth from its fate. She’s walked among humans, she tells a fellow Eternal, and seen what they’re capable of – including the events of Avengers: Endgame, where Earth’s mightiest heroes undid Thanos’ erasure of half the universe’s population.
But Eternals repeatedly (if not gratuitously) shows us the worst of humanity, from the Spanish conquest of the Aztecs to the nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Nor do we see the Eternals themselves engage any sort of real moral reasoning or display any moral development. Indeed, we see the Eternals come to blows over the Spanish conquest “literally ten feet from the altar where priests wearing flayed human skin would cut hearts out of living victims by the hundreds.” One Eternal uses his powers of mind control to tramp off into the Mexican wilderness with a number of Aztecs and conquistadors. When we encounter him again, the movie tells us he’s less pessimistic about humanity - but he still has no compunction using humans as cannon fodder against the antagonists attacking the remote jungle village he’s ruled for centuries. It’s a profound moral indifference that suffuses Eternals and exemplifies the movie’s general condescension toward and ultimate contempt for humanity.
What’s more, Eternals stands as a jarring contrast with – if not outright betrayal of - the rather humanistic themes that have suffused the Marvel Cinematic Universe to date. The Avengers, for instance, don’t just fight to save a deeply flawed humanity from adversaries like Loki, Ultron, and Thanos; they’re the avatars of a deeply flawed humanity themselves. It’s illuminating to contrast the scorn for humanity on display throughout Eternals with the final, quiet conversation between the Vision and Ultron at the conclusion of Avengers: Age of Ultron. When the Vision tells Ultron that “humans are odd… But there is grace in their failings,” the villainous robot responds that humanity is doomed. Vision agrees, but reminds Ultron that “a thing isn’t beautiful because it lasts” and that “it’s a privilege to be among them.”
It’s a contrast that’s also striking and apparent when it comes to the movie’s thinly drawn and lifeless characters. Character is nothing less than the beating heart of the MCU, the foundational element of a sprawling fictional enterprise that convinces audiences to care about and believe in the heroism and essential humanity of a billionaire ex-arms merchant, a former assassin with fresh blood dripping from her hands, and even a gun-toting, foul-tempered talking space raccoon with a walking arboreal companion whose vocabulary is limited to three words. Without these characters and their messy, often chaotic humanity, the whole undertaking collapses.
Unfortunately, none of the characters in Eternals prove to be particularly compelling or sympathetic – in no small part because they all seem to think themselves above humanity. Kumail Nanjiani’s Kingo, for instance, repeatedly abuses and ridicules his devoted and long-suffering valet Karun, who also happens to be the only human character we spend much time with over the film’s nearly two-and-a-half hour run time (brief bookend appearances by Kit Harington’s Dane Whitman notwithstanding). There’s very little sense of why the Eternals do what they do over the course of the movie, with their rather thin notions of morality seemingly emerging out of nowhere and depriving the film any moral gravity or emotional weight. A number of the Eternals, moreover, appear to have bizarre moral breaking points that ignore the cavalcade of bloodshed and human folly that they’ve presumably witnessed over the millennia. In the end, Eternals gives audiences no reason to care all that much about its characters or take their impoverished morality all that seriously.
It all leads up to a perfectly serviceable climax that’s preceded by a dispute among the Eternals over whether to save humanity or let the grand scheme of the quasi-divine Celestials - and the concomitant destruction of humanity - proceed as planned. But this debate rests entirely on superficial abstractions like “love” and “blind faith” untethered from messy, flesh-and-blood reality and lacking in basic humanity. There’s a distinct tendency in contemporary culture to equate abstraction with intellectual superiority and aesthetic sophistication (especially in art of whatever sort), but narrative explorations of abstract concepts typically remain shallow and unconvincing if they’re not grounded in engaging, fully realized characters and their own struggles.
Eternals reminds us that when we obsess over abstractions without tethering them to reality, we risk losing touch with our own humanity at a fundamental level. That’s ultimately why Eternals fails: it’s a disheartening film with a basal contempt for humanity that’s trying to find a place in a wider suite of cinematic narratives founded on the heart and humanity of its characters.
