Movie Review: Eternals
Movie Review · 1 comment · 250 words
What a dull and plodding movie. It is utterly devoid of joy, wonder, and excitement. Instead, we get obviously bored actors reciting tediously incomprehensible exposition for two hours.
It's Captain Planet for the modern age. Only with their powers combined can our calculatedly-diverse cast defeat the baddies! So just like every other MCU story. The eponymous Eternals are aliens masquerading as gods - so far, so Erich von Däniken. But, somehow Palpatine returned their old enemies have come back. Can they get the team back together and save the world? Yes, obviously.
I find it hilarious that Disney have successfully rebranded 16:9 aspect ratio as IMAX Enhanced!!! What this means is that the aspect ratio changes every few shots - sometimes several times in the same scene. I found that quite distracting.
Even if you enjoy watching your plastic action figures mooching around a green-screen, it is just so flabby. Your pop-corn will have gone stale before anything interesting has happened.
There are a few bright points - Harish Patel is the perfect sidekick. It's nice not to have a wise-cracking kid for once. Lauren Ridloff is also great - and I was impressed that the story made a reasonable effort to have the other characters use sign-language to communicate with her.
But, in the end, it's just a clunking piece of cinema. It turns out that you can do anything with special effects - except craft an interesting story.
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Ian Betteridge says:
God yes. I was incredibly hopeful for this, because I thought it was incredibly interesting that Chloe Zhao was directing ("Nomadland" is brilliant), and the big cosmic celestial stuff in Marvel is full of interesting potential. But it was just plodding nonsense, which made far far too little of the actors. And compared to Shiang-Chi - which was delightful - it was just woeful.