HOW TO FIX: ETERNALS
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Of course, Marvel’s Eternals is not a bad movie. I wouldn’t bother writing about how to fix a bad movie: I’d just enjoy its badness. What Eternals is is that most common of filmic phenomena: a movie that could’ve been good but decided not to be. So here is how, if you had the chance to go back and shout at Chloe Zhao before she started, you could fix Eternals - how Eternals could’ve been really great. By the way, spoilers, OBVIOUSLY.
Remove it from the MCU. The Marvel Cinematic Universe is a great thing, but it’s got enough stuff in it. Not just enough movies already made, but enough characters to keep on making movies about indefinitely. It doesn’t need ten more superheroes, plus a whole new mythology, plus Blade, plus Jon Snow apparently being about to become the Black Knight. You’re allowed to wipe the slate clean, Marvel. Make Eternals the first movie in a NEW cinematic universe, rather than trying to cram every property you have into the same big saga. Because if you take Eternals out of the MCU, you not only get to cut the scene where it’s explained why these powerful godlike beings sat on their hands while Thanos eliminated half of all life, AND the scene where the Eternals sit around and banter about the Avengers for no apparent reason: you ALSO don’t have to deal with the fact that your explanation doesn’t really make much sense. After all, it is explicitly stated in Eternals that Thanos’s finger snap delayed the emergence of the new Celestial, and bringing on the emergence is the Eternals’ entire raison d’etre, so…why would Arrishem not have instructed them to go help? The Celestials care about the big vascular super-hyenas killing too many humans, but not about Josh Brolin killing HALF of the entire population? C’mon. Also, if the Eternals aren’t in the MCU, it doesn’t raise awkward questions about why immortal beings specifically designed to be superheroes seem to be less powerful than ordinary superheroes. I mean, Tony Stark invented a suit that makes him better than Ikaris - the Celestials couldn’t do better than Tony Stark? There’s also the simple fact that if Eternals isn’t an MCU movie, it might actually FEEL fresh, like a new thing that is starting, rather than just, “ah yes, another one rolls out”. Not to mention the fact that now, the knowledge of the Earth being created as an incubator for a giant baby kind of hangs over every other MCU movie.
Figure out what the movie is about, and make sure the movie is about that. In this case, Eternals is about certain things: It is about the Eternals’ quest to save Earth, their discovery that their purpose is to help bring about Earth’s ultimate destruction, their decision to rebel against that purpose in order to save humanity, the moral dilemmas raised by that decision, and Cersi and Ikaris’s centuries-long love affair. So…how about making the movie about those things? And not making it about things that are not those things? Because the movie is not about Thena’s homicidal-maniac disease, and it’s not about Phastos’s angst about Hiroshima, and it’s not about Sprite wishing she could be a grown-up so she could bone Ikaris (incidentally, why DID the Celestials make one of the Eternals a little girl? And another one deaf? How did these things serve their purpose? But anyway…). Now of course movies can have subplots, but when you’ve got a movie that not only has to tell its story, but also has to introduce ten characters and show you the cool shit they can do because hardly anyone knows the comic books so we all need a crash course in Eternal-lore…well you just don’t have time to faff about with every Eternal’s own private battles. Not unless you are going to give horribly short shrift to the actual story you want to tell. As it is, we see far too little of the complications of Cersi and Ikaris’s relationship, and even less of the agonising we should be getting over the decision. Remember that the destruction of the Earth is for the purpose of creating new worlds and new peoples, so preventing it is making a pretty big sacrifice, cosmically speaking. Plus, there’s the fact that preventing it might end up in the whole planet being nuked by the Celestials as punishment anyway. There’s a lot to thrash out, and it doesn’t get thrashed out nearly enough. There’s also the REASON they rebel: the reason is the Eternals love humans, and do not want to see them exterminated. One line from Salma Hayek is all we really get on this. As it turns out, Ikaris looks like a psychopath and Cersi doesn’t seem to have any more motivation for doing what she does that Ikaris has. The character of Druig - played by Barry Keoghan which is a bold casting choice for a character who isn’t a professional assassin - offers a bit of pushback on the Eternals’ mission, when he protests against not being able to save human lives when he’s perfectly capable of doing so. We should have seen more of that, more questioning, more wrestling with ethical conundrums. Better that than waste time on Phastos crying over Hiroshima despite apparently being pretty cool about the Holocaust. What’s more, Phastos’s “giving up on humanity” doesn’t even last. We see him crying at the end of WWII, then literally the next time we see him he’s entirely gotten over that and loves humanity again. In fact the reason he’s reluctant to help is that he cares TOO much about humans. So if that’s his motivation, what was the point of the Hiroshima nonsense anyway? But then, Phastos is a problematic character in general because his purpose - the developing technology thing - is a whole murky area that is never properly explained. There’s really no need to get into it as much as they do, because it doesn’t affect the main story at all. But also because the makers really needed to…
Remember there will be sequels. This is why you don’t have to explore Sprite’s hatred of being little, or Phastos’s nuclear guilt, or Thena’s disease, or the superintelligent deviant who gets created, makes a little speech, and is then offed. There are going to be more Eternals movies. The final scene literally sets up the next one. You have TIME to explore every charfacter in more detail in further instalments. You don’t have to give everyone an arc in this one. We’ve got Cersi and Ikaris, we’ve got Druig for added moral complexity, and we’ve got Kingo for comic relief. The others can be there for cool action and occasional one-liners, and get their moments to shine next time around. If you try to give everyone time in the sun, what you end up is no one really getting proper treatment. And since we mentioned Kingo…
Let Kingo come back to help. Kingo and Karun are the funniest bits of the film and it’s good to have them there. Would’ve been even better if Kingo could’ve played some part in the climax. Instead, having decided he disagrees with Cersi, he just walks away and doesn’t come back until the world is saved and he’s taking Sprite to school or whatever. Either have him come back and declare that friendship is more powerful than ideology so he’s willing to help Cersi, or have him come back and be full-on anti-Cersi and the Celestials’ new champion, or SOMEthing. The way it plays out feels like Kumail Nanjiani went all Peter Sellers and walked off the set before they could finish. Which is not what happened, it’s just that they didn’t know how to write a satisfying script.