20s Movie Review - Eternals

Director: Chloé Zhao
Genre: Adventure/ Action/ Science Fiction/ Fantasy
Runtime: 156 minutes
Year: 2021
Starring: Gemma Chen, Richard Madden, Angelina Jolie, Salma Hayek, Kit Harrington, Kumail Nanjiani, Lia McHugh, Brian Tyree Henry, Ma Dong-Seok, Lauren Ridloff, Barry Keoghan, Bill Skarsgård

Description: The saga of the Eternals, a race of immortal beings who lived on Earth and shaped its history and civilizations.

Review: In the massive, ethnically diverse “Eternals, no less than ten new superheroes are introduces to viewers at once. An extremely ambitious project, bit is this really the promised gamechanger for the Marvel Cinematic Universe?
Ajak, Thena, Ikaris, Kingo, Sersi and the others fight against so-called Devians who have long been a threat to humanity and the Eternals themselves. Not that you’ll notice much of that, as the monsters are defeated without much of a fight by a team of heroes with fairly generic superpowers: one shoots lasers out of his eyes, the other rays of light out of fingertips.
But above all, don’t leave too early. “Eternals” takes a little time to get up to speed, because the pace is a little different than you’re used to from Marvel. The film covers a period of around seven thousand years and happily hops back and forth between different time periods and different locations.
The film opens (like “Star Wars”) with a piece of text that rolls across the screen and so we learn that the Eternals have indeed been roaming the universe since the creation of heaven and earth. Of course, this immediately raises an essential question, for why didn’t these primal superheroes help when Thanos decided to eliminate half the world’s population? The answer is really simple: the Eternals were not allowed to get involved.
Although at first this seems to dismiss the matter a little too easily, along the way “Eternals” unrolls a theological head-scratcher that ties in quite nicely with all that has happened before. Arishem, an entity with a body of cosmic proportions, has his own plan for the universe, but it would be a shame to reveal how the Eternals fit into that picture.
Biblival, Babylonian and Greek myths are mixed up and turned into this entertaining Marvel flick. A lot was changed, there are many differences between the comics and the movie ( I looked it up, didn’t know anything about “Eternals”).
It’s almost a surprise that Chloé Zhao directed it. The woman behind “The Rider”(2017) and “Nomadland” (2020), where she used documentary-like style to highlight marginalized groups in society: men who do not conform to the macho ideal, for example, or poor people who are forced to roam their own country as nomads. Her idiosyncratic way of filming is nowhere to be found this time.
“Eternals” is not a failure, but certainly hasn’t become the gamechanger we were promised. The film has a lot going on, many characters, but only a few get enough attention to understand their motivations or sympathize with them. Many characters you just want to get to know better and with the long runtime you expect there is enough time to do so. But sadly, a lot of the characters are still  underdeveloped.  

Rating: 2,5/ 5