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ETERNALS (Spoiler Discussion Thread)


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Saw this on Friday and was mostly just whelmed. Didn't know a whole lot besides that it was an Ancient Aliens type thing and that it was a Jack Kirby thing. I probably spent too much of time looking for myth-related Easter Eggs and trying to figure out what god/Hero Druig was supposed to be (ikaris flying into the sun, while predictable, was a nice touch). The main dude looked way too much like Bucky Barnes and I was never able to get over that, really not a fan of that casting for that reason alone. It was difficult to throw that many characters in cold, and then start learning their relationships and quirks along the way. I like the visual touches (although my wife thought the early scenes looked cheap).

I don't know if I would rewatch unless it was part of a marathon, and I can't say that I'm particularly excited about a sequel even with Patton Oswalt involved.

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On 11/7/2021 at 8:36 PM, J.T. said:

However it does make sense that Thanos himself would be an MCU Eternal robot and that his galactic campaign of mass genocide was all part of somehow keeping future Emergences from taking place.  If that is the context, it brings new depth to Thanos and makes him out to be much more than some murderous despot.

Film Theory has jacked my geeky exposition.

 

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Saw this last night. Thought it was perfectly solid if a little long. Generally speaking I liked most of the Eternals though I kind of agree Ikaris and Sersei were probably the least interesting. I don't blame Chan for the latter though I do think Madden was probably more the issue with the former. I can see a point in Angelina Jolie almost being too big an actress for her character though I thought she did well enough. Dug the rest a good deal, especially Kingo and his valet.

I know very little about Eros/Starfox, but I enjoyed the post credits scene. Same with the story of Dane and Ebony Blade. Curious to see how they follow up with all of this.

I like @J.T.'s theory that Thanos was trying to slow down emergences. Puts an interesting new context into his reasoning for killing half the universe, especially if he didn't know what planets all the mergences were taking place.

Edited by Eivion
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As per usual, one of the Turner networks was running MCU movies all weekend and rewatching Infinity War and Endgame, Thanos pretty clearly spells out his intentions, especially the second time - saying fuck even leaving half the universe alive to be potentially ungrateful, I'll start from scratch. I don't think homie had any loftier, unspoken intentions ?

I'm waiting for Eternals to be on D+ for various reasons, but going into it with a positive outlook based on what the people I trust are saying, but even if it's not groundbreaking I'll at least be home with the family, bathroom breaks, and all the food and drink I could want. 

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14 hours ago, TheVileOne said:

Even if you slow down emergences that's probably a drop in the bucket for Celestials.

Not knowing how many Celestials there are to begin with in the MCU or how many are prepped to emerge doesn't allow us to qualify whether or not it is a drop in the bucket.

Gauging from Arashem's angry reaction to Tiamat's failed emergence, I'd deduce that this was a pretty large setback made even worse by the Eternals cracking the code on how to prevent an Emergence without murdering a significant portion of a planet's population.

Edited by J.T.
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  • 2 weeks later...
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So I just saw it and liked it. Is that a hot take? Obviously, it could never be made as a non-MCU movie, but it probably would have worked better if it didn’t take place in the same world as Spider-man et al.

Thought Kit Harrington was surprisingly good in his few minutes of screen time. The fight in the village was a real strong point.

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Yeah I really, really liked this - don’t know why people were hating on it. It was a lot of talking and minimal action for a Marvel movie, but it was still really good. Easily the best looking MCU movie to date. Sign me up for Eternals 2.

And fuck it, I’m here for Starfox and Pip the Troll. I wonder if Blade and/or Black Knight will pop up in Moon Knight.

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So I thought this was very good as well. I think it was much better suited for your living room from a pacing and time perspective even if how it was shot called for a big screen.

Biggest change I'd make would have been resolving the deviants issue after the jungle village battle. Take out "Kro" permanently there and then focus Thena (who had already mentioned that she shifted blame in her head to the traitor) on that final fight. It'd just make things cleaner and clearer. I'd also keep the Batman reference which was surprising and funny (as Kingo is nothing like Batman and Karun, while having his own grace, is a bit off type as well) and landed on maybe the best character in the entire movie and dump the Superman one since that was too far, too on the nose, and doubled down on something that would disrupt immersion for no real reason.

I'm sure there had to be a draft where Karun had a rousing speech that inspired Kingo to come back. It's crazy that he didn't. I've never seen a movie/show/novel/comic where the character in that position didn't show up at the 11th hour to help, I think.

There are plot holes and far less character holes but I wasn't bothered by either "Where were the Eternals in X movies" or "Where were the other heroes here?" save for the fact that Ajak was so inspired by them to change her entire worldview and sacrifice everything but then didn't reach out to them to work with them when there was just days to go before the emergence. I'm going to have much more of an issue with character problems like that than plot problems in these things. Only other one is that even if they put the Celestial back to sleep, there seems to be absolutely no way to get it out of the planet given the size of the thing, so it didn't feel like a real solution to me, just a stall.

Hiroshima scene was completely fine since it put the blame/onus on humanity. You didn't get the sense that Phastos helped them make the bomb but that he gave them technology six steps back on the chain that may have allowed them to get there or to get there more quickly.

Most of all, I think the twist really work and it spiraled thing out to be an entirely different movie than we were promised/advertised, and a  much better one. That's why I would have been cool with closing off the deviants stuff right before the twist.

Oh, and Dane's presence was pretty clunky. You needed something to help show how Sersi was so connected to humanity but there's also another movie where he's your more your POV character instead of Karun/Phastos' husband/Sersi herself/etc. I found Sersi frustrating for personal reasons as she's the only character I had a previous meaningful connection to as Bob Harras' Avengers run was the Avengers run of my youth and I came in right during the time she was really losing it. She's such a bombastic, dynamic character and here she was a wallflower and it's fine as it served the movie, but that's a case where I think they gutted a lot of the spirit/heart of the character as opposed to just the trappings/powers in a way they didn't with Zemo and others people complain about.

And the lack of chemistry between Ikaris and Sersi was fine. She had evolved, he hadn't. He couldn't. It makes sense. There was so much more tenderness between Druig and Makkari for instance.

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I'm a little more than halfway through it with a couple breaks along the way. This is...fine? I would go so far as to say that it's good, but I probably would have hated watching this in a theater. Most of the Eternals themselves are blander than boiled chicken. It really says something when Kit Harrington has more charisma than most of the super hero team. I also tend to think Richard Madden sucks.

The story itself scratches that cosmic Marvel itch for me so I like it for that. I just wish all of the characters were more interesting and less, uh, pondering their orbs. I'll probably finish this up today.

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I totally forgot about Kingo just disappearing and never coming back, not even at the very end when they all went off to look for other Eternals in the universe. And nobody even talks about it from when it happens to the very end of the movie. Yeah that's real weird.

Angelina Jolie was really good in this too, but maybe it's because she didn't speak a lot. 

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Idk guys... this was... aggressively dull. Like when you mail something in and it's dull, it's just kind of there. To be this kind of dull you actually have to put in some work to achieve it. I'm quite surprised to see mostly positive reviews in here. Maybe knowing the source material makes it easier to follow along? To me, someone who knew nothing about the property, it gave me great physical pain to finish all 15 hours. What's that... it was only 2.5 hours? Coulda fooled me. My best way to describe this movie would be to say it's like someone setting up a security cams in the Sahara and you had to work a double shift watching the cameras with nothing happening what so ever all night long. I did enjoy the 2 minutes of a drunken troll we got in the mid credits scene.

Cue up that Alvarez sound byte of the minus five stars deal. That's my official rating. No sir, I didn't like it.

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As soon as Black Widow and Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings were free as part of the Disney+ subscription I watched them day one unlike Eternals. I'll try and catch it this weekend. Not expecting much as the trailers did nothing for me and cosmic MCU isn't my thing at all barring Thanos.

Edited by The Natural
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Finished watching it and I actually thought it was pretty good. It did seem weird that Tiamut was able to make it to the surface of the planet without, you know, there being any sort of major destruction...or that now there is a stone statue protruding from the core of the earth, but whatever I guess. The fighting at the end looked pretty cool.

Of the cast, Brian Tyree Henry, Kumail, Barry Keoghan, and Angelina Jolie stood out the most. I didn't care much for the performances from anyone else except maybe Lauren Midloff and Kit Harrington.

Post credits scenes were good and I'll echo that, man, JUST SHOW BLADE!!!!!!!!!!! Come on! CGI for Pip did look a little bad I suppose.

I would say that a sequel to this would be welcome. It was good enough for it.

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I got exactly halfway through this tonight on D+ before I tapped out due to boredom.

I applaud Marvel for trying to do a more serious movie, but I wasn't invested in any of the characters, and I felt no sense of stakes. Forty minutes into the movie, I felt like it had been 90. By 90 minutes I had to give up.

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I enjoyed the first half of the film (the historical scenes and the getting the team back together stuff) but got lost in the plot around the time the turn happened. It was decent, nothing special, but it did leave me wishing for a movie where gods sit around observing humanity at various points in history. Directed by Herzog or Malick.

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I enjoyed this. Not my favorite or anything, but it wasn’t bad. Mostly, I just wish I’d got more of each character. 
 

This would’ve been a better series, IMO. First episode or two is the backstory with them ridding the world of Deviants, then each character gets and episode on what they’ve been up to. Then the last two or so are them coming together again for the emergence. 
 

Surprised to see so many of you all having trouble getting bored with it. It kept my 4-year-old’s attention all the way through. He was really into it. 

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I can't speak for anyone else, but my boredom came from not really caring about any of the characters, and not really having a reason to. If I don't care about the characters, and I don't think the plot is engaging, then I will check out pretty quickly.

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That’s a good point. I think the characters were good and the actors playing them did well, but we just didn’t get enough to care about them. Sprite’s arc is the one that got the most shorted, imo. It’s was just kind of, “Oh, she’s tortured by her situation and madly in love” out of nowhere. 

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