Continuing after the events of Avengers Endgame, Eternals introduces us to a new group of heroes.  We learn that the Eternals are ancient aliens who have been roaming around our Earth for thousands of years.  They exist in secret and have protected humans against the monstrous threat of The Deviants.  After the Eternals kill every Deviant on Earth, they all decide to take a new path in life.  However, when a Deviant is spotted again on Earth, the team must investigate how an old enemy of theirs may have somehow returned.

The characters within the Eternals are extremely different to anything we’ve ever seen within the Marvel universe.  The same can be said about the film’s plot, pace, style, and ultimately, the direction in the Marvel Universe.  The plot is heavy, deep and, at times, even a little dark.  While I welcome a new plot, concept, and direction in the universe, perhaps it’s just me, but I found Eternals to be quite heavy and dialogue-heavy. I’ll confess that there are multiple times when I found myself confused about the plot or various terminologies.

For the most part, we follow our leads in the present day, but we are also greeted with various and random flashbacks.  Thankfully these flashbacks do give viewers a much better understanding of the characters.  For the sake of spoilers, I won’t be discussing the characters or their performances in this review. 

Visually, Eternals is a good-looking film, but lovers of action will be sad to see fights scenes that are extremely dark and generally set at night.  Action sequences are fun, but they certainly don’t have the same hype or character investment during battles as we’ve seen in the past films.

Overall, while a new direction to the Marvel universe is welcomed, I’m not sure how I feel about this one. There’s plenty of fun to be had, but it requires a bit more work from the viewer than previous Marvel films. It’s dialogue-heavy, and, at times, I felt confused by the story and vague new direction. Again, action scenes are fun but generally dark; otherwise, it’s a stunning film visually. Eternals is a big change, and the question is, are fans ready? For me, this film certainly warrants a repeat viewing, which I hope will win me over more significantly.

6.4/10

2nd November 2021

Written by Peter Walkden

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