Spoilers Eternals grade and discussion thread

I was struggling to remember which 4 movies happened.

I'd forgotten about Black Widow because it was naff.

 

Out of the four last year I'd rank it as follows:

Spider Man: NWH
Shang-Chi
Eternals
Black Widow

 

The Avengers can take care of Tiamut's corpse with Pym particles.

 

And leave a giant eternal shaped cavern in the Earth?

 

Lower the corpse into the hole and then enlarge it again. It would have to just be shrunk enough to sink again.

 

I haven't gotten to see NWH yet, but Shang-chi was one of the best marvel movies in existence. And while Black Widow and Eternals were both middle of the pack Marvel movies, imo, Black Widow was definitely the more engaging and fun of the two.

 

Black Widow was more fun to watch, but it's flaws were in some ways less forgivable than Eternals, as it was a small-scale narrative that would have been incredible with some minor tweaks to the family dynamic and a less boring antagonist.

 

Production wise maybe but no way in hell could Sony pull that off creatively. That has Marvel's handwriting all over it.

 

I don’t know… They made Spider-Man 2.

 

Which isn't a great movie, honestly. Raimi's entire aesthetic was hokey AF and Tobey was a terrible Peter Parker. Plus Raimi directed Molina into one of the absolute worst performances of his career. But it looked pretty and hit notes for people that no other superhero movie was bothering to even try hitting back then.

But without needing to go ten rounds about an old movie, even if one stipulates that SM2 was a supposed masterpiece, it's still an 18 year old movie and Sony's great creative instincts had them forcing Raimi to do all kinds of things in the sequel he never wanted to do leading it to receive by far the worst reputation of the trilogy, then kicking him off the character entirely in favor of the Amazing reboot. Which almost everyone hated, or at least didn't like very much.

They've also been chasing the mega-franchise dream ever since and failing repeatedly to get franchises off the ground, often for very similar reasons. Their greatest hits so far are Venom, which basically lucked into being a beloved 'so bad it's good' series where people pay money not so much to see a good movie as to thrill at Tom Hardy making himself look like a moron for 2 hours, and Jumanji which is pretty much their only unequivocal franchise success story this decade but which also took a significant hit on the sequel and seems to be stuck in limbo with no real movement for the 3rd installment.

 

In the covid riddled theatre that I watched Spider-Man, Andrew Garfield received a three minute long standing ovation, when he showed up.

Normal people, tourists, are fricking Wierd.

 

How do you know it was covid riddled?

 

Because it was assigned seating.

 

It wasn't completely terrible, acutally good in parts, but it was too long, had too many characters and had long stretches that were just dull. They introduce all the characters in flashback, but then have to get the gang back together and like 90 minutes in they're still re-introducing characters and getting the gang back together. Sersi and Ikarus are supposed to be the main characters, I guess, but they both show the least emotion out of everyone and we get no sense at all of their supposedly seven thousand year love story (Thena/Punchy Man was actually a much sweeter love story.) Kingo was fun but just says "actually, I can't help!" before the end and disappears for the last half hour. I kind of like the Irish guy but he was pretty underdevloped. Phastos comes into it too late. And so on. It was funny how the start makes it look like Jon Snow is going to be one of the main characters then he just disappears after the first fifteen minutes.

Some of it looked very nice (if you like scenes shot just before the sun rises/sets then this is the movie for you!) and I appreciated the minimal (or less noticable) CGI and green screen in the location stuff, but the deviants looked terrible. Literally like something from a video game. It was really hard to enjoy any action scene with them in it because they didn't look like they were really there. And the leader was just there to give Thena a (not that great) fight scene. The CGI on Pip the Troll looked horrible too. The evil celestial looked good though.

I liked how Makkari's powers were done, it wasn't the usual slow motion speedster stuff. The fight scene everyone had with Ikarus at the end was by far the best action bit but it was two hours into the movie.

The celestial bursting out of Earth is supposed to destroy the planet but part of its head and hand come through the surface and the planet is completely fine?

I appreciated that it tried to be different from the usual MCU tone but the more typical movies Shang-Chi and No Way Home were more enjoyable so they'll probably just stick to the usual forever!

 

An egg yolk.

Imagine there's a trillion ton sack of life goo that is hauled out behind the celestial, that ruptures the word.

Also the Celestial had been baking too long because the Blip prolonged the gestation period.

It could have used up the yolk, and been starved of nourishment to the point of brain damage.

 

The movie actually explicitly says it's not the physical birth of the celestial that destroys the world. The Celestial - in being born - has to consume the life force of the entire human race. That's why the Eternals had to safeguard human population growth in the first place, so that there would be enough humans on the planet for the celestial to be born.

But it's not weird if people forgot that part since the movie basically doesn't reference it at all anymore in the climax and kind of acts like the human race never noticed anything at all other than some earthquakes and the mystery appearance of a giant marble hand. I guess maybe the celestial has to break free of the surface before he eats everyone?

 

I didn't get the impression that the Celestial had to eat anyone. Just that the energy brought about by Humans just walking around gave it life.

 

Arishem says 'Our universe is a constant exchange of energy. An infinite cycle of creation and destruction. Celestials use energy gathered from host planets to create suns generating gravity, heat and light for new galaxies to form.'

So since Earth is explicityly the 'Host planet', then the Celestial has to actively gather energy from it. Not just break loose and destroy it.

 

Finally saw this the other day and I found myself pretty bored, which is usually the last thing I feel during a Marvel film.

Some good humor in there, but I found myself checking the time more often than not.

Why was this so long? Especially when Spider-Man was a similar length, and was much more entertaining.

 

Again, I feel the central flaw in the story is the director did nothing to make us care about the characters/think of them as real people (rather than robots or actors playing a role).

NWH worked because it told a coherent emotional story for Peter Parker. That's harder in ensemble films, but you can fit character arcs for multiple characters into a single film. You just can't do it for 10 characters in 2.5 hours.