Eternals

[Trippy]

Teaser trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0WVDKZJkGlY

Edit: Who's Who https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=751C4p0ANno (some potentially mild spoilers based on existing information)

[Riggswolfe]

I find it hard to care about this and was underwhelmed by the trailer. Then again, I had pretty much the same reaction to the first trailer for Guardians of the Galaxy so who knows?

[HaemishM]

This didn't seem like a trailer so much as a collection of pretty images with very little context for anything, especially the conflict that is supposed to drive this movie. It's definitely pretty.

[Velorath]

Based on rumors floating around, right now I’m expecting the Deviants to be the main source of conflict through most of the movie with the Celestials to kinda be the real “villains” overall.

[Sky]

Meh.

[Khaldun]

Felt a bit like a National Geographic special version of the MCU.

[Sky]

The costumes felt like a DCU version of the MCU.

[schild]

Jolie feels like a DCU casting call.

[Khaldun]

Trailer made a lot of people realize Guardians might be great, but also a lot of people who knew the comics were like "no, honestly, Guardians of the Galaxy is fun and cool".

This is under a double burden--everyone who knows the comic source material is like "well, I dunno, this shit has always been kind of mediocre" (I mean, I cannot think of a single comics fan I've ever met who is like ETERNALS IS MY FAVORITE!!!)  The comic is basically Kirby being pissed at DC for not backing New Gods all the way and him trying to do it again after having read Erich Von Daniken too many times and then it becomes Roy Thomas continuity porn. And then it's everyone else going wow what a cast and what a director and I wonder what it actually is and then they see the teaser and they're like "oh, that seems sort of like a video from Bible school that crawled into the Internet with vague artificial intelligence and acquired knowledge of Marvel comics and tried to seem slightly relevant and then died."

[Khaldun]

Also on that explainer video, MCU Thanos ain't a Deviant. Unless they decide otherwise.

[Abagadro]

This has the whiff of that Inhumans abomination of a tv show about it. Not good.  Doesn't help that half the cast are complete stiffs.

[Teleku]

Think it's hard to make an opinion based on that trailer one way or the other.  Not having even heard of the Eternals comic, all I got was that some aliens came to earth a long time ago and have been hanging out ever since.  And lots of pretty stuff happens across time.  I can see it potentially being really good, but just have nothing to go on from the trailer.  Of course explaining why they didn't intervene when the Earth was about to be wiped out the last few times will be a trick, but could come up with some clever stuff.

[Velorath]

I saw enough in that trailer that connects with enough of the summary of the story that was supposedly leaked, that I'm increasingly confident the leak was accurate. I won't go into spoilers here, but if it is accurate they're pulling a big plot point from a non-Eternals story that I'm very interested in seeing play out. Don't know if the movie itself will be good, but they get the benefit of the doubt from me for now.

[Teleku]

Yeah, I'm expecting something about the level of Captain Marvel at worst from what I see.

Actually, on a random side note to that comparison, did a double take when I saw they casted Gemma Chan in this.  Will she be the first actor to play two different characters in the MCU (other than Stan Lee, heh)?

[Sir T]

Yeah, I'm expecting something about the level of Captain Marvel at worst from what I see.

Actually, on a random side note to that comparison, did a double take when I saw they casted Gemma Chan in this.  Will she be the first actor to play two different characters in the MCU (other than Stan Lee, heh)?

And Lou Ferigno, who has camioed in every Hulk movie and did the Hulks voice in the Second Hulk movie. (no idea about the rest of them...

[Sky]

MCU is just the movies specifically made by Marvel Studios, afaik. Otherwise there's stuff like Thanos/Cable with Brolin.

[Khaldun]

If you buy the explanation of Stan Lee's cameos in the MCU that popped up in one of the Guardians movies, he was the same character every time. :)

I think the thing that puzzles me a little bit about the Eternals looking at the cast of characters and that trailer is Kit Harington as Dane Whitman aka the Black Knight. His major interaction with the Eternals in the comics is from the really bad 90s Avengers where he and Sersi were in a troubled romance, but he also does do some oddball time-travelling (he's frankly kind of a weird character when you look at his overall history) so I suppose they could just decide that in the MCU he's an Eternal who really got into medieval European warfare. Still feels odd to shoehorn him in here unless this is just one more distribution of a future Avengers character around the various films and TV shows (e.g., like having Photon in Wandavision, etc.)

[Sky]

I feel like the MCU is going to take an interesting turn if it goes for the millennial audience's source material. I stopped reading in the late 80s, just as things started to become unglued in the comics industry in the 90s. So I'm predisposed to not really dig anything from that era, so I get to experience it first in the MCU. Hope they can make the material strong without any nostalgia to build on (for me, I'm sure it will be a massive hit because 90s is the new 60s for nu-boomers  ).

[Velorath]

If you buy the explanation of Stan Lee's cameos in the MCU that popped up in one of the Guardians movies, he was the same character every time. :)

I think the thing that puzzles me a little bit about the Eternals looking at the cast of characters and that trailer is Kit Harington as Dane Whitman aka the Black Knight. His major interaction with the Eternals in the comics is from the really bad 90s Avengers where he and Sersi were in a troubled romance, but he also does do some oddball time-travelling (he's frankly kind of a weird character when you look at his overall history) so I suppose they could just decide that in the MCU he's an Eternal who really got into medieval European warfare. Still feels odd to shoehorn him in here unless this is just one more distribution of a future Avengers character around the various films and TV shows (e.g., like having Photon in Wandavision, etc.)

There's a fairly good 12 issue Eternals series from the mid-80s which has Sersi is in a kind of relationship with a professor (just a regular human). He does lectures on the history of the Earth and the Celestials that nobody but him remember afterwards, so he's a regular guy but one of the few people that knows about the Eternals and the Deviants. I feel like they're maybe pulling from that a little with Dane playing that role (and also because as you mention there's a thing between him and Sersi in the 90s, and they're both Avengers).

[Khaldun]

Yeah, could be that Dane is going to be the "ordinary human" who provides a viewpoint on all of this but also is helpful to the Eternals because he's a physicist. (Probably of the same kind as Jane Foster and Erik Selvig, able to provide superhero-ready analysis of cosmic phenomena.)  Better than Margo Damian and her archaeologist father in the original Kirby Eternals series--Margo was a kind of knock-off Lois Lane, as I remember it.

[Trippy]

Actually, on a random side note to that comparison, did a double take when I saw they casted Gemma Chan in this.  Will she be the first actor to play two different characters in the MCU (other than Stan Lee, heh)?

Technically not the first but does look to be the first with two non-trivial/cameo/incognito roles.

https://www.ranker.com/list/mcu-actors-who-played-multiple-characters/stephanroget
https://www.cbr.com/actors-two-roles-mcu/

[Trippy]

I stopped reading in the late 80s, just as things started to become unglued in the comics industry in the 90s.

Late 80s into early 90s was the best time to be a collector, or at least the most fun

Felt like a switch had suddenly flipped and comic books went from how they had been done for decades into a new era with a weird / new change seemingly every month. Better inks, papers, better artists / artwork, computer aided graphics, variant covers, multiple treatments for the same cover, regular series "reboots" back to Issue #1, artists / creatives gaining power and prestige, starting their own publishing companies, so on and so forth. Of course most of things were completely stupid but it was still a fun time to be collecting.

[Soulflame]

Based on rumors floating around, right now I’m expecting the Deviants to be the main source of conflict through most of the movie with the Celestials to kinda be the real “villains” overall.

It looks like you nailed it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x_me3xsvDgk

[Khaldun]

That looks to be Warlord Kro in that kind of bondage-y scene near the end of the trailer.

You certainly get a much clearer idea of what the movie's going to be about and where it fits in this one.

I think considering that after integrating Kirby's Eternals into the Marvel universe quite a long time back, they retroactively decided that the mutant gene was part of the Celestials' alteration of humanity (they made Eternals, Deviants and then the 'X-gene' that would start expressing at some unspecified point in the future, with Apocalypse turning out to be the first X-gene expressor in ancient Egypt), this is really starting to look like the movie that's going to open the door to the X-Men.

[Soulflame]

Just wanted to point out that the celestial with 6 eyes appeared in Guardians of the Galaxy, for about 2 seconds.

Edit:  Or, on reading more, I guess the celestial in the trailer is a different one than the celestial in GotG.

[Khaldun]

But it looks pretty much like *A* comic-book Celestial, at any rate. No clouds of gas or whatever to substitute.

[Soulflame]

They do appear to be going with the idea that Celestials come back to judge their tampering later, as the one in GotG was using the power stone to wipe that planet clean of life.

Which seems unnecessary, as they would (should?) be able to do that without using a power stone.  Of course, Loki has opened the door for there being multiples of the stones.  Or were those stones from multiple universes?

[Sky]

I believe they were multiversal stones, since it's likely nothing outside the scenes from the Avengers movie happened in our timeline.

[Velorath]

They do appear to be going with the idea that Celestials come back to judge their tampering later, as the one in GotG was using the power stone to wipe that planet clean of life.

When it's mentioned at the beginning of the trailer that enough energy was created for "the emergence" it seems to confirm that they're going with a very Earth X take on the Celestials and what their purpose for messing around with planets is.

The take on Eternals seems to be slightly different than normal if we're to take the line about them coming to this planet 7000 years ago literally.

[Rendakor]

They do appear to be going with the idea that Celestials come back to judge their tampering later, as the one in GotG was using the power stone to wipe that planet clean of life.

Which seems unnecessary, as they would (should?) be able to do that without using a power stone.  Of course, Loki has opened the door for there being multiples of the stones.  Or were those stones from multiple universes?

I took the scene from Loki to indicate that they were stones from alternate timelines/universes.

[Khaldun]

Kirby's Eternals had unusual knowledge about the Celestials and to a limited extent thought they might be able to communicate with them; e.g., the Eternals (and Deviants, actually) knew about where they came from. But he never went into that in a super-detailed way.

Over the years, Marvel has laid out an idea that the Celestials do this kind of thing on most planets--the Skrulls are supposedly the Deviant branch of Skrulldom who won out on their planet. But there don't seem to be any other planets with the X gene--the Celestials seem to be up to something more with Earth for unstated reasons.

[HaemishM]

There are Infinity Stones in every universe according to the comics, but they only work in their own universe. This was confirmed in the lead up to the Secret Wars series from a few years back.

[eldaec]

There is something bugging me about the footage for this that keeps making me think 'inhumans TV show' rather than 'avengers follow up movie'.

I think it is that the leads keep interacting with cgi junk and doing bad exposition but you never see them interact with human society on any scale.

That the most exciting thing they could find for a trailer is MCU continuity exposition doesn't leave me hyped.

[Sky]

There is something bugging me about the footage for this that keeps making me think 'inhumans TV show' rather than 'avengers follow up movie'.

I think it is that the leads keep interacting with cgi junk and doing bad exposition but you never see them interact with human society on any scale.

That the most exciting thing they could find for a trailer is MCU continuity exposition doesn't leave me hyped.

I agree this looks cheesy af. Loki managed to make some cheesy stuff cool, but I'm not seeing that cool factor here. Jolie doesn't look like a cool confident warrior type to me, she always comes off as smug actress mugging for fanbois.

That said, I do disagree about the exposition. If I have to sit through a cheesefest, at least it can connect some dots and keep the story going. Like being forced to buy a couple issues of the Eternals comics even though it sucks, because they did a cross-title event. Which I hated in comics, but it's been better with MCU...but it will inevitably go wrong at some point. And this looks really, really dumb and laden with CGI.

I'll say it again, someone (Didny) needs to get Marvel Studios their own Volume. FAST. Green screen has always looked bad, but now it looks bad and dated, because we've seen the Mandalorian. Give something to the actors to work from, ffs.

The scene of exposition on the porch was the best part of the trailer. All the action looked cheesy and holy crap fake Cyclops. What a difference a visor makes, I guess. Stinkaroni.

[Soulflame]

What the hell good are eye lasers if they don't actually do anything.