‘Eternals’ Signals The End Of Marvel As We Knew It

If “Eternals” is any indication, Marvel’s glory days are officially behind it.

Some lovely world-building, full of color and light notwithstanding, from beginning to end, the film is a mess.

The storyline centers on a group of immortal beings fashioned by the great celestial energy god Arishem to battle deviants — neon, fiber-optic dinosaurs that traverse the planet feeding on humankind. After thousands of years, the Eternals have finally destroyed the last of them, and are free to roam the world finding their own purpose, hanging in bars, making movies, riding the range.

That’s what they’re doing when an evolved breed of deviant shows up, setting them off on a journey for answers.

This sounds kind of fun. And I wish it were. But with the exception of Kumail Nanjiani who offers, without question, the only real reason to see the movie, the story takes itself far too seriously for fun or, really, even logic.

Complicating plot twists surface and disappear and we’re never clear if they were important to begin with. Someone is suddenly revealed to be in love with someone else yet there’s been no foreshadowing to achieve emotional impact. Characters’ motivations, that we are supposed to believe were forged through millennia, shift on a dime, but seem to indicate deep religious faith is bad and will make you kill the people you love.

Ultimately Eternals commits the one sin a blockbuster, superhero movie can never be redeemed from — it’s dull.

The issue is primarily that Marvel is no longer content to make entertainment. Now, under Kevin Feige’s new direction, it wants to make commentary. It wants to be relevant. Instead, it often ends up ridiculous, taking you out of the world of the movie as you begin thinking about the kind of fawning, celebratory headlines Slate and Vox are going to write about it.

The prime example is Arishem’s creative decisions in fashioning this team of minor divinities: A Chinese woman, a Middle-Aged white woman, a Hispanic woman, a deaf woman, an androgynous child, a Korean man, an American black man, an Indian man, and, finally, a pair of Gaelic white guys.

This overt rainbow coalition would have been fine if the film had bothered to offer some utilitarian explanation for it. How hard would it have been to throw in a line about needing to reflect the varieties of humans, or some such superhero boilerplate? Instead, the unaccountable diversity is taken as such a

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