Eternals (2021) — Review

I have watched Eternals once. The 1 reflects honest evaluation of one of the worst Marvel Cinematic Universe entries, redeemed only by specific sequences involving the Celestials that operate at higher craft level than the surrounding material. The film is the Phase Four MCU’s clearest example of decorative diversity-casting failing to compensate for structural storytelling problems, philosophical incoherence, character development absent across a two-hour-thirty-seven-minute runtime, and the broader franchise’s loss of editorial discipline. The 1 acknowledges what the Celestial sequences accomplish while honoring what the rest of the film fails to deliver.

The film also represents the broader Phase Four pattern of MCU productions that prioritize political optics over storytelling craft. The decorative-diversity framing dominates the marketing, the character introductions, and the narrative structure. The actual storytelling collapses underneath these priorities. The pattern would compound across subsequent Phase Four entries before producing the catastrophic commercial failures of 2022 and 2023.

The Setup

Ten Eternals, immortal beings created by the Celestials to protect humanity from creatures called Deviants, have lived on Earth for seven thousand years. They have not interfered with human conflicts (including World War II) because their assignment was specifically Deviant-elimination. The Deviants were apparently eradicated centuries ago, leading the Eternals to disperse across the planet and assume human identities while waiting for further instructions from their Celestial creator Arishem.

The film opens in present-day with the apparent reappearance of Deviants, prompting the scattered Eternals to reassemble. The investigation reveals that the Eternals’ original mission has been a deception. The Celestials use planets as gestation sites for their own offspring. The energy generated by the planet’s accumulated intelligent life serves as the gestational fuel. The Eternals were created to protect humanity from external threats only so that humanity could grow into a population large enough to power the eventual birth of a new Celestial from Earth. The “emergence” of the new Celestial would destroy Earth in the process. The Eternals must decide whether to follow their original programming or rebel against their Celestial creators to save humanity.

The Celestials

The Celestials are the film’s actual achievement. The visual design of these planet-scale beings draws on Jack Kirby’s cosmic art from his 1970s Marvel Comics work. The scale is staggering. The aesthetic is genuinely alien. The single sequences in which Arishem appears to Ikaris or the broader Celestial cosmology is depicted contain more imaginative imagery than the rest of the runtime combined.

The cosmic mythology the film introduces has substantial potential. The premise that planets are gestation sites for godlike beings, that intelligent life is incidental to the cosmic reproduction cycle, that the universe operates on scales humans cannot meaningfully comprehend: all of this is the kind of cosmic-scale science fiction that Marvel Comics has produced reliably for decades and that mainstream cinema rarely attempts. The Celestial sequences honor this material with appropriate visual ambition.

The film as a whole fails to integrate the Celestial material with the human-scale drama the rest of the script attempts. The Celestial sequences operate at one craft level. The Eternals character drama operates at substantially lower craft level. The transitions between registers are awkward. The audience receives cosmic imagery that demands processing as profound and then character drama that demands processing as personal, with insufficient connective tissue between the two registers. The Celestial sequences alone might have justified a substantially higher rating. The Celestial sequences embedded in this surrounding production receive partial credit at best.

The Cast Without Characters

The film features ten Eternals as ensemble leads. The casting is high-profile: Gemma Chan as Sersi, Richard Madden as Ikaris, Salma Hayek as Ajak, Kumail Nanjiani as Kingo, Lia McHugh as Sprite, Brian Tyree Henry as Phastos, Lauren Ridloff as Makkari, Barry Keoghan as Druig, Don Lee as Gilgamesh, and Angelina Jolie as Thena. The diversity of the cast is genuinely impressive in terms of representation across ethnicity, gender, disability (Ridloff is deaf and Makkari is the franchise’s first deaf superhero), and sexual orientation (Phastos is the franchise’s first openly gay superhero).

The casting is also one of the film’s central failures. Ten leads across a single film with cosmic-scale mythology cannot receive sufficient character development to register as individuals. The film attempts to give each character specific traits, specific relationships, and specific story functions. The runtime cannot support this density. Most characters end the film with the same emotional foundation they had at the start. The relationships between characters are stated rather than developed. The audience receives the diverse ensemble as decorative presence rather than as functional drama.

The performances themselves are largely competent. The actors are mostly experienced professionals doing what they were asked to do. The problem is the material rather than the execution. Salma Hayek as Ajak has approximately fifteen minutes of screen time before being killed off, eliminating the character whose presence might have provided the ensemble with structural anchoring. Angelina Jolie as Thena has more screen time but is given a memory-loss condition that prevents her character from developing through clear continuous psychology. Gemma Chan as Sersi is positioned as the central protagonist but the character’s emotional range is sufficiently limited that she cannot carry the dramatic weight the ending requires.

The Decorative Diversity Problem

The Eternals marketing prominently emphasized the cast’s diversity across multiple dimensions. The MCU’s first deaf superhero. The MCU’s first openly gay superhero. The MCU’s first major South Asian lead. The MCU’s first ensemble with substantial racial diversity in primary roles. The marketing framing positioned the diversity as a primary reason to engage with the film.

The diversity is real. The film deliberately includes characters from underrepresented populations and treats those characters with dignity. Phastos has a husband and child. Makkari operates as a fully functional superhero using sign language. The representation is not tokenism.

The diversity is also decorative rather than load-bearing in the specific sense that has been discussed in the Bring It On review and the Captain Marvel review. Remove the diversity from the cast and the plot would function identically. The characters’ specific identities do not generate the story’s events. The story would work mechanically with a different ensemble composition. This is the test that distinguishes load-bearing social content from decorative social content. Eternals fails this test consistently.

The failure produces audience resistance among viewers who can detect the difference between integrated representation and marketing-driven representation. The Phastos family sequence in which his son demonstrates the joy of human invention is genuinely affecting on its own terms but does not generate plot. The Makkari sign-language combat sequences are visually inventive but do not require deaf representation to function. The decorative diversity earns critical praise from outlets that prioritize representation as primary metric while producing audience disengagement from viewers who came for storytelling. The pattern would compound across subsequent Phase Four entries.

The Two-Hour-Thirty-Seven-Minute Problem

The film runs two hours and thirty-seven minutes. The runtime is among the longest in MCU history and is not justified by the material being depicted. The first hour establishes the ten Eternals across multiple historical periods through repeated flashback structure. The middle hour follows the reassembly of the scattered team in present day. The final thirty-seven minutes deliver the climactic Celestial confrontation and resolution.

The pacing problems are severe. The flashback structure dilutes audience investment in any single historical period because each scene cuts away before establishing emotional weight. The reassembly sequences feel mechanically dutiful as the script visits each character in their current setting and recruits them back into the team. The character interactions feel obligatory rather than developed. The audience watches actions occur without receiving the dramatic motivation that would make those actions matter.

A more disciplined edit might have produced a substantially better film at two hours or less. The Celestial mythology could have been preserved. The strongest character beats could have been retained. The redundant reassembly sequences and the diluted flashback structure could have been compressed substantially. The film as released contains material that better editing might have made functional. The film as edited contains the material distributed across a runtime the material cannot support.

Chloé Zhao’s Direction

Chloé Zhao won the Academy Award for Best Director for Nomadland in 2021, the year before Eternals released. The hiring was widely considered ambitious. Zhao’s previous work had been small-scale independent drama with documentary-influenced visual approach and substantial commitment to landscape photography. The transition to MCU ensemble work was a significant change in scale and genre.

The direction shows specific elements of Zhao’s previous approach. The landscape photography is genuinely beautiful in sequences set in remote locations. The Celestial sequences benefit from her willingness to let visual scale operate without overcrowding the frame. The character interaction sequences feel less successful because Zhao’s documentary-influenced approach does not translate effectively to action film conventions or to dialogue-driven ensemble drama.

The result is a film that contains specific Zhao strengths (landscape, scale, contemplative pacing) embedded in genre conventions that her previous work had not prepared her to handle. The marriage of director and material was less successful than Marvel Studios likely anticipated. Zhao’s subsequent career has returned to smaller-scale independent work, which appears to be the better fit for her sensibility.

The Ikaris Betrayal

The third-act twist reveals that Ikaris, the team’s most physically powerful member, has been operating as Arishem’s secret agent throughout the film. Ikaris has known about the Celestial deception and has been working to ensure that the emergence proceeds successfully despite the other Eternals’ opposition. The betrayal kills Ajak, kills Gilgamesh, and produces the team’s central conflict for the final act.

The twist is structurally functional but lacks emotional weight. The character work on Ikaris through the earlier sequences had not established sufficient interior life to make his ideological commitment to the emergence land as character motivation. The audience receives the twist as plot mechanism rather than as character revelation. The eventual decision by Ikaris to fly into the sun after losing the climactic conflict is meant to read as tragic but lands as procedural conclusion to a character whose interior life the film did not develop.

The relationship between Ikaris and Sersi that ostensibly motivates much of the character drama is similarly underdeveloped. The two characters have been in love for thousands of years according to the script. The film provides essentially no evidence for this beyond stated declarations. The audience does not experience the relationship as established because the establishment was never adequately depicted. The third-act emotional weight that requires the audience to invest in the relationship falls flat because the foundation was never built.

Craft: A Visual Mythology Trapped In A Failed Film

For the broader analysis of how Phase Four codified the franchise problems Eternals exemplifies, see How The Multiverse Destroyed The MCU. For the structural problem of Infinity Saga consequences that Eternals tries to operate alongside, see The Snap, The Blip, And The Catastrophe The MCU Refused To Show.

The Verdict

A 1. Eternals is one of the worst major MCU entries and the Phase Four film that most clearly demonstrated the franchise’s loss of editorial discipline. The Celestial sequences and the cosmic mythology are genuinely impressive achievements buried inside a failed ensemble drama. The two-and-a-half-hour runtime contains insufficient narrative content to justify the length. The ten-character ensemble cannot develop any individual character to functional dramatic depth. The decorative diversity-casting prioritizes representation marketing over load-bearing storytelling. The Ikaris betrayal lacks the emotional foundation required to land.

I have watched it once. I do not plan to watch it again. The Celestial sequences alone would justify selective sampling of specific scenes rather than complete rewatch. The 1 rating reflects the value of these specific sequences against the larger structural failure. Other viewers may rate the film slightly higher or lower depending on how they weight the Celestial material against the surrounding production. The film deserves the criticism it received and represents one of the clearer early examples of the Phase Four collapse that has continued through subsequent productions.

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FAQ

Are the Celestials really worth watching for?

The specific Celestial sequences are genuinely impressive and represent some of the most ambitious cosmic imagery the MCU has produced. The visual design draws on Jack Kirby’s comics work with sustained scale attention. Viewers interested in cosmic-scale science fiction may find these sequences worth selective viewing through the film’s existing copies. The rest of the film does not deserve the same engagement and can be safely skipped or watched at reduced attention.

Is the diversity-casting criticism fair?

The criticism is fair specifically about how the diversity is integrated into the story. The cast diversity itself is genuine and includes meaningful representation across multiple dimensions. The integration of this diversity into load-bearing story function is where the film fails. The characters’ specific identities do not generate plot. Remove the diversity from the cast and the story would proceed identically. This is the test that distinguishes integrated representation from decorative representation. Eternals fails the test. The criticism is not about the diversity itself but about how the film deploys it.

What did Chloé Zhao do wrong?

Zhao’s direction shows specific strengths (landscape photography, contemplative scale, willingness to let visual material breathe) that match her previous independent film work. The same approach does not translate effectively to MCU ensemble action conventions. The action sequences feel underdirected. The character interaction sequences lack the dramatic punch that more conventional direction would have provided. The marriage of director and material was less successful than Marvel Studios anticipated. The film’s failure is not entirely Zhao’s responsibility but her sensibility was clearly not the best fit for the genre conventions the franchise required.

Why is the runtime so long?

The film runs two hours and thirty-seven minutes. The runtime is not justified by the actual narrative content. The extended length contains repeated flashback structure that dilutes individual historical periods, dutiful reassembly sequences that follow each character without developing them, and character interaction that does not advance relationships beyond their initial introduction. A more disciplined edit might have produced a substantially better film at ninety to one hundred and ten minutes. The released runtime is one of the film’s most visible problems.

Did the film perform commercially?

Eternals grossed approximately four hundred and two million dollars worldwide on a budget of approximately two hundred million dollars. The commercial performance was substantially below MCU expectations and represented one of the earliest signs of the Phase Four audience-confidence problem. The Rotten Tomatoes critical reception was the lowest for any MCU film at the time of release. Subsequent Phase Four entries would underperform at increasing rates. Eternals was an early indicator of the trajectory.

How does this fit into the broader MCU trajectory?

Eternals is one of the Phase Four films that most clearly demonstrated the franchise’s loss of editorial discipline. The decorative diversity, the runtime expansion, the cosmic mythology imperfectly integrated with character drama, the assumption that audiences would tolerate inferior storytelling for representation reasons: all of these elements would recur in subsequent Phase Four productions including The Marvels in 2023 and Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania in 2023. Eternals was not the worst Phase Four entry but was among the earliest examples of the patterns that defined the phase’s failure.

Are there better cosmic MCU films?

Guardians of the Galaxy (2014, rated 6.5 in this review) handles cosmic scale more successfully through its tonal commitment to space-opera conventions. The cosmic sequences of Infinity War have larger scale than Eternals but suffer from broader structural problems. The MCU has not yet produced the cosmic film that fully delivers on the potential the genre offers. Eternals represented an ambitious attempt that failed for the reasons described. Subsequent attempts may eventually succeed where this one did not.

Is Ikaris worth caring about?

Not really. The character’s third-act betrayal reveals him as a long-term Celestial agent, but the earlier character work did not establish sufficient interior life to make the betrayal land as character revelation. The audience receives the twist as plot mechanism. Richard Madden’s performance is professionally committed but the material does not give him room to develop the character meaningfully. The eventual flight into the sun is meant to read as tragic but lands as procedural conclusion. The character represents one of the more underdeveloped major MCU figures.

Should I watch this if I’m completing the MCU?

If you are committed to viewing every MCU film, watch Eternals once and move on. If you are selectively engaging with the franchise, the film can be safely skipped. The Celestials introduction may become relevant in future MCU productions, but the basic premise (Celestials use planets as gestation sites, Eternals were created to protect humanity until emergence) can be summarized in a paragraph rather than requiring two and a half hours of viewing investment. The film does not reward attention. Selective viewing or skipping is acceptable.