Eternals

Marvel promised a slightly different comic book movie, and they delivered. But now, an hour after leaving the cinema, I don't know if that's a good thing. Eternals is a very ambitious film, but perhaps too much so, because it tries to tackle a lot of themes in a small space, and with a dozen heroes to boot. As a result, there's not much time to meditate on faith, fate, mythologies, religion and responsibility. Even at 160 minutes, it ends up feeling truncated in a way. On the other hand, the face of the new Marvel movie is indeed markedly different, with Eternals not even trying to reference other superheroes much (instead they make fun of DC) and confidently going its own way and in a rather different direction. I really don't know if that path is the right one right now. Chloé Zhao handles the action and all the attractions with aplomb, but she was clearly making a more ambitious film from that was supposed to be the start of something bigger. And at the same time, she had so many things to deal with in it that it just couldn't be done without compromises and shortcuts. So far, I'll say that Eternals is interesting rather than downright good. But it is very interesting. (11/03/2021)

Now I have no worries about the new MCU film phase. Yes, Shang-Chi received the same rating from me, but I did have a few reservations about it, but I can't think of a single complaint about Eternals. The film is surprisingly very much about the characters and the relationships between them, and that's the nicest thing about it. Of course, there are action scenes and they are great, but that's not the main thing Eternals has to offer. These are new and completely unknown heroes, of which there are quite a few, but thanks to the elaborate script and their representatives, they are not interchangeable and we get to know and understand them well. In addition to the characters, the film also miraculously manages to explain a completely new mythology, link it with what we already know, and offer a BIG promise for the future. The finale is one of the best we've seen from Marvel - something big, truly huge happens, but it doesn’t just happen "to make something happen," but rather is logical and entirely appropriate. Pure 100% satisfaction. (11/04/2021)

They say Eternals didn't pull in the audience in Czechia, and in the end there are a grand total seven of us in the theater. The timing of the premiere was sadly not ideal, and the competition had nothing to do with it. But I don't want to talk about that, let's get to the film. I don't think I've ever been this bored and disappointed by Marvel. I don't understand the need to make a movie into something that the typical viewer definitely isn’t looking for. Why try for depth when the characters are so simplistic? Next time you’d do better to send in a few extra monsters and pick some cooler dudes. I don't much care for these experiments. Of the characters, I think I liked Kumail and his cameraman the most, he made me laugh at least twice. I was looking forward to Dong-seok Ma, but I still like him a lot better when he's actually doing a bit of acting. If you want action and emotion, go see Bond, he's a real super hero. (11/09/2021)

First of all, I have to point out that Eternals is one of the more interesting Marvel movies. It is a rather whimsical and perhaps over-ambitious extravaganza that both introduces us to individual heroes and then quickly puts them into action collectively. It is as if all the origins of the first phase of the MCU up to the Avengers team-up were condensed into one single movie. So you can imagine that there is a shit-ton of unavoidable introductions and explanations vs. very little action (and when the action does come, it is a terrible mess of CGI). However, I was pleased to see that the main protagonists rather unusually and uniquely deal with at least some of the dilemmas of whether what they are doing is really the right thing to do. This therefore also makes the villains slightly ambiguous - I would like to see more of that approach in the future! Also, just when I had been so taken in by the rather impressive conclusion and was practically determined to give it four stars there came what was probably the worst mid-credits scene I have ever seen in the Marvel Universe. It seemed like it was something out of a Shrek movie, and therefore undermined any enthusiasm for what had happened before by reminding me what a calculated product it really is. Plus, if Marvel itself does not take its "different and ambitious" movie seriously, how could I respect it? (11/02/2021)

The most surprising comic book movie, at least within the MCU. Not only because of the whole range of stimulating themes it addresses, but unfortunately also because of how polarizing it is. Personally, I appreciate it for the amount of audacity and alluring elements it contains. I have seen the silent, contemplative, and in a way, adorable Eternals twice already, and each time the seemingly modest duration felt painfully too short for me. No joke, I would like a four-hour film or a slow-paced series because I am so drawn to this world, and it saddens me that due to obscure marketing it remained a mystery to the fan base before and after the premiere. Every time, after watching, I ponder for hours and days about the choices of the powerful, about predestination for great things, about fate and its variability, about the beauty of ordinary life, about love that can last a few days or centuries, and last but not least, about the inevitability of gaining and losing your closest friends. Only after all of that comes the pleasant wink in the form of the transmission of cultural values across eras, and I was okay even with those, but I still shake my head as to why this very small detail is such a red rag to the public. Such a peaceful film with a perfectly understandable and necessary message, and still it provokes such absurdly strong negative passions. (06/27/2022)