Eternals

 With its arrival on Disney Plus, I've now seen Eternals, the... well, I guess not most recent MCU movie given that Spider-Man No Way Home came out in theaters, but in this Omicron time I'm avoiding crowded spaces for the time being, so, I'll have to wait (not even sure what platform it'll be on, as the Spider-Man movies have not, I believe, been on D+)

Eternals feels different than the other MCU films. We have gotten some of the brightly-colored "cosmic" stuff with Guardians of the Galaxy and Thor Ragnarok, but the story here is broad and epic in a different way, confined almost entirely to Earth.

And it's that broadness that I think hamstrings the movie.

One of the reasons why the first Avengers movie worked so well was that the major players had all had their own introductions. Four had had their own movies (yes, Edward Norton's Hulk is canonically the same as Mark Ruffalo's, and we've seen elements of the Incredible Hulk kind of drip back into the MCU canon) and the two remaining ones, Hawkeye and Black Widow, each showed up as supporting characters in one of those movies.

Super-teams can be tough, though. Again, I think Guardians of the Galaxy wound up working in part because it was less of a classic superhero narrative.

The Eternals has a lot of very big ideas to present to the audience. And it has a lot of "central" characters - the eponymous Eternals, of which there are ten. We've then also got to introduce the concept of the Celestials (which seems a little different than how the concept was introduced to us via Ego in GotG2). We also have the concept of the Deviants, which are so dull as monsters that even watching the trailer it was clear that they were a misdirection - though it turns out that they remain an unrelated, secondary threat up to the climax of the movie basically so that there's enough people for everyone to fight.

Oh, and Kit Harrington's character, Dane, would seem in the beginning to be a minor character except that it's Kit Harrington, so you know he's not going to be - this is just one of the more flagrant "we're just introducing this character now so he can be in stuff later" things that I think the MCU is usually a little better about.

Lest I be all critique, though, I will say that one of the movie's real strength's is that it looks totally different from other MCU films. Chloe Zhao fills the movie with gorgeous landscapes to serve as the characters' backdrops, with beautiful natural light. The movie has a sort of Terrence Malick look to it at points, which even extends to many of its action sequences. Even if the Deviants our heroes are fighting are super-generic, there's a fluidity to the cinematography and a willingness to use longer takes that make the action feel scrappier, despite these being some of the more powerful characters we've encountered.

Conceptually, the Eternals arrived on Earth 7000 years ago, and have been around as civilization has developed, protecting humanity all this time, and becoming part of the myths and legends of history. Some of these figures are more obvious than others ("Thena" oddly enough had a lot of fans in Athens,) but it's a cool concept that also contributes to the utterly absurd degree to which the MCU's cosmology is getting complicated.

I don't think the twists and turns of the story are hard to spot coming, but that's sort of ok - I think a twist's success is not measured by how hard it is to see coming, but on how well it shifts the narrative. There is a moral question at the heart of the antagonists' actions that allows for a bit of debate here, which actually, in an odd way, kind of makes this a cosmic horror story.

The movie tries to juggle a lot of characters, and I think that the most common problem that can cause winds up being a big thing here: protagonist syndrome. Sersi, played by Gemma Chan, is the character we focus on in the movie, seeing things from her primary perspective, but unfortunately, this leaves her little time to really get much of a personality. Indeed, I think only a couple of the characters really get a chance to break out. Brian Tyree Henry is great as Phastos (the sort of craftsman of the group, and the basis for Hephaestus,) who has the most stake in the world as a married man with a kid (also, the most "just try to edit this out of the movie for China and Russia" gay character in the MCU - the plot involving his husband and their kid is a pretty significant part of the movie, and we have what I think is the MCU's first same-sex kiss). Kumail Nanjiani also a lot of fun as Kingo, who has used his immortality to become a dynasty of Bollywood stars, and who brings his trusted valet around to shoot a documentary about the Eternals as they go on their quest.

Anyway, the movie ends with a promise for more, and I'm sure with the MCU's longterm planning we'll see these characters again, but I think any future Eternals-centric move is going to need to find a little more focus.