Marvel Studios brings yet another installment in the vast franchise that is the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The “Eternals,” directed by Chloé Zhao, has mixed reactions across the internet. While the movie’s quality is similar to other Marvel movies, “Eternals” is just not up to par.
The main characters live forever, yet the audience is supposed to believe that seeing Earth develop from the very beginning had no effect on their personality or development as a person. It feels as though we as the audience are not watching characters who have seen and done it all in their immortal lives.
There are centuries connecting everyone in the main cast, yet the way they all interact with each other does not give that impression to the audience. There is something missing in their chemistry. Where this should be a major impact of the story, it just feels dry. It is disappointing to see as there are many big names who were a part of the cast: Angelina Jolie, Harry Styles and Gemma Chan to name a few.
The movie suffers from the expectation that each movie in the MCU must be an enormous spectacle on a grand scale. While the early movies spent more time on characters, this movie spent more time on the ideas they were going for.
Since there was a big cast, there was not enough time to flesh out each character. This caused the characters to have potential, but they lacked pay off. It would have been better if this movie was a television series instead. This may have fixed the issues that the poor pacing of the movie caused.
There was so much that the movie tried to cram in its runtime, so much so that there are several parts where the characters and audience do not have that room to breathe. The emotional moments would have hit harder if there was more time to make the audience connect with these characters.
Overall, this movie was a great deal of wasted potential. There were plenty of good concepts and ideas, but in the end, it was rushed and overhyped by the fans before release. This is just another movie to be forgotten about and skipped over in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.