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Title: Eternals
Post by: Trippy on May 24, 2021, 10:35:14 AM
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)


Title: Re: Eternals
Post by: Riggswolfe on May 24, 2021, 06:42:56 PM
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?


Title: Re: Eternals
Post by: HaemishM on May 24, 2021, 06:47:15 PM
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.


Title: Re: Eternals
Post by: Velorath on May 24, 2021, 07:34:01 PM
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.


Title: Re: Eternals
Post by: Sky on May 25, 2021, 06:28:16 AM
Meh.


Title: Re: Eternals
Post by: Khaldun on May 25, 2021, 09:31:34 AM
Felt a bit like a National Geographic special version of the MCU.


Title: Re: Eternals
Post by: Sky on May 25, 2021, 09:38:03 AM
The costumes felt like a DCU version of the MCU.


Title: Re: Eternals
Post by: schild on May 25, 2021, 04:39:42 PM
Jolie feels like a DCU casting call.


Title: Re: Eternals
Post by: Khaldun on May 25, 2021, 08:19:23 PM
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."


Title: Re: Eternals
Post by: Khaldun on May 25, 2021, 08:21:01 PM
Also on that explainer video, MCU Thanos ain't a Deviant. Unless they decide otherwise.


Title: Re: Eternals
Post by: Abagadro on May 25, 2021, 10:41:19 PM
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.


Title: Re: Eternals
Post by: Teleku on May 25, 2021, 11:46:52 PM
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.


Title: Re: Eternals
Post by: Velorath on May 26, 2021, 12:15:53 AM
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.


Title: Re: Eternals
Post by: Teleku on May 26, 2021, 02:52:20 AM
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)?


Title: Re: Eternals
Post by: Sir T on May 26, 2021, 06:57:40 AM
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...


Title: Re: Eternals
Post by: Sky on May 26, 2021, 08:03:35 AM
MCU is just the movies specifically made by Marvel Studios, afaik. Otherwise there's stuff like Thanos/Cable with Brolin.


Title: Re: Eternals
Post by: Khaldun on May 26, 2021, 08:14:52 AM
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.)


Title: Re: Eternals
Post by: Sky on May 26, 2021, 08:30:48 AM
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  :grin:).


Title: Re: Eternals
Post by: Velorath on May 26, 2021, 10:59:12 AM
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).


Title: Re: Eternals
Post by: Khaldun on May 26, 2021, 12:09:10 PM
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.


Title: Re: Eternals
Post by: Trippy on May 26, 2021, 12:24:20 PM
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/


Title: Re: Eternals
Post by: Trippy on May 26, 2021, 12:32:44 PM
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 :awesome_for_real:

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.


Title: Re: Eternals
Post by: Soulflame on August 19, 2021, 08:18:59 AM
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


Title: Re: Eternals
Post by: Khaldun on August 19, 2021, 10:20:24 AM
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.


Title: Re: Eternals
Post by: Soulflame on August 19, 2021, 11:41:29 AM
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.


Title: Re: Eternals
Post by: Khaldun on August 19, 2021, 01:20:00 PM
But it looks pretty much like *A* comic-book Celestial, at any rate. No clouds of gas or whatever to substitute.


Title: Re: Eternals
Post by: Soulflame on August 19, 2021, 01:39:50 PM
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?


Title: Re: Eternals
Post by: Sky on August 19, 2021, 01:45:07 PM
I believe they were multiversal stones, since it's likely nothing outside the scenes from the Avengers movie happened in our timeline.


Title: Re: Eternals
Post by: Velorath on August 19, 2021, 02:30:25 PM
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.


Title: Re: Eternals
Post by: Rendakor on August 19, 2021, 02:34:54 PM
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.


Title: Re: Eternals
Post by: Khaldun on August 19, 2021, 05:38:06 PM
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.


Title: Re: Eternals
Post by: HaemishM on August 19, 2021, 07:40:42 PM
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.


Title: Re: Eternals
Post by: eldaec on August 20, 2021, 02:49:44 AM
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.


Title: Re: Eternals
Post by: Sky on August 20, 2021, 06:20:14 AM
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.


Title: Re: Eternals
Post by: Soulflame on August 20, 2021, 08:37:51 AM
What the hell good are eye lasers if they don't actually do anything.


Title: Re: Eternals
Post by: eldaec on August 20, 2021, 09:56:43 AM
I don't necessarily mind exposition in the film. In the trailer though it worries me a little.


Title: Re: Eternals
Post by: HaemishM on August 20, 2021, 07:34:25 PM
There is something bugging me about the footage for this that keeps making me think 'inhumans TV show' rather than 'avengers follow up movie'.

Well, in the comics, the Eternals have always felt like "Jack Kirby takes another swing at Inhumans" so that tracks.  :why_so_serious:


Title: Re: Eternals
Post by: Khaldun on August 21, 2021, 08:23:28 AM
I always thought it was more like "Jack Kirby takes another crack at the New Gods with some Erich von Daniken garbage admixed into it".


Title: Re: Eternals
Post by: Rendakor on August 22, 2021, 08:46:36 AM
They needed at least a little exposition for those of us who have never heard of the Eternals, Deviants, etc.


Title: Re: Eternals
Post by: SurfD on August 22, 2021, 12:48:46 PM
They needed at least a little exposition for those of us who have never heard of the Eternals, Deviants, etc.
What, like an entire movie perhaps?   :awesome_for_real:


Title: Re: Eternals
Post by: Khaldun on August 22, 2021, 02:43:55 PM
Yeah, I mean, if the trailer can explain everything about the Celestials, Deviants and Eternals in two minutes, it's not gonna be much of a movie.


Title: Re: Eternals
Post by: eldaec on August 23, 2021, 07:39:35 AM
They needed at least a little exposition for those of us who have never heard of the Eternals, Deviants, etc.

They did not need 'hey why didn't you fight Thanos?'.

Esp not in a trailer.

If you want bad irrelevant exposition about an entirely different film in your movie, OK I guess just keep it to a minimum. But if it is the most enticing dialog you could find for a trailer, then it doesn't bode well.

Also, I knew nothing about the Eternals prior to these trailers, but guessed 100% for what I needed to know from the name 'Eternals'.


Title: Re: Eternals
Post by: Rendakor on August 23, 2021, 08:13:23 AM
It was the most common complaint I heard about Captain Marvel: why didn't she just show up and solo Villain X in Movie Y? This addressed that, which I did not mind.


Title: Re: Eternals
Post by: Trippy on August 23, 2021, 08:44:31 AM
For Captain Marvel they addressed this indirectly in Endgame on the call with Black Widow where Captain Marvel said she was busy helping other people in the galaxy deal with the Snap. The same would apply to the years beforehand (from the 90s onwards) -- she was busy dealing stuff away from Earth. And you could ask the same thing about Thor as you can Captain Marvel. Thor even had the Bifrost to teleport him instantly to Earth so he could've shown up whenever if he was in any of the other Realms so he has even less of an excuse.


Title: Re: Eternals
Post by: schild on August 23, 2021, 10:54:13 AM
sweet

can i bring up iron man not wrapping up winter soldier in 5 minutes again


Title: Re: Eternals
Post by: Khaldun on August 23, 2021, 10:58:00 AM
It's a basic problem in superhero universes period. Superman and Batman aren't totally pals these days but honestly any time Batman's really up against it--some douche motherfucker has blown open Arkham Asylum for the fiftieth time or the Joker is threatening to gas downtown Gotham etc, he should just ring up Superman for a quick thirty-second clean-up rescue visit. (There's a fun episode of the animated series that basically riffs off of this idea.) In Marvel comics, most of the time a world-ending thing is happening, it always turns out that the Avengers are off-planet or the Fantastic Four is in the Negative Zone or Doctor Strange is taking a shit in his Toilet of Mystic Horror. (That's kind of why the issue of FF where everybody shows up to fight Galactus was so fun--for once everybody was actually around.) The MCU has hit a point of sufficient density of superhero population that they're going to have to have those little cinematic footnotes too in most of their movies.


Title: Re: Eternals
Post by: schild on August 23, 2021, 11:12:27 AM
It's a basic problem in superhero universes period. Superman and Batman aren't totally pals these days but honestly any time Batman's really up against it--some douche motherfucker has blown open Arkham Asylum for the fiftieth time or the Joker is threatening to gas downtown Gotham etc, he should just ring up Superman for a quick thirty-second clean-up rescue visit. (There's a fun episode of the animated series that basically riffs off of this idea.) In Marvel comics, most of the time a world-ending thing is happening, it always turns out that the Avengers are off-planet or the Fantastic Four is in the Negative Zone or Doctor Strange is taking a shit in his Toilet of Mystic Horror. (That's kind of why the issue of FF where everybody shows up to fight Galactus was so fun--for once everybody was actually around.) The MCU has hit a point of sufficient density of superhero population that they're going to have to have those little cinematic footnotes too in most of their movies.

99% of the time I'm on board with this

but i bring up winter soldier because new york is in one of the fuckin shots, focused on stark tower

in the mcu, it's uniquely annoying to me, moreso than Captain Marvel being AWOL


Title: Re: Eternals
Post by: Velorath on August 23, 2021, 11:33:51 AM
sweet

can i bring up iron man not wrapping up winter soldier in 5 minutes again

You can bring it up, and I'll bring up again all the ways IM3 showed that wouldn't happen.


Title: Re: Eternals
Post by: Soulflame on August 23, 2021, 11:54:44 AM
That particular dialog worked for me because it led directly to "who the hell is giving you orders" which then led naturally to the glimpse of the Celestial giant red robot bad guy(?).  Probably.


Title: Re: Eternals
Post by: Draegan on August 24, 2021, 07:50:10 AM
I thoughtbthe kine worked well.


Title: Re: Eternals
Post by: Sky on October 03, 2021, 11:49:03 AM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wHpUqVktG74

So much green screen.


Title: Re: Eternals
Post by: schild on October 04, 2021, 07:47:10 PM
i fear this might be the worst marvel movie with really out of place comedy

i hope i'm completely wrong


Title: Re: Eternals
Post by: eldaec on October 25, 2021, 02:15:26 PM
So, shit reviews then.

I'm not sure even the dodgy MCU films have received properly bad reviews.


Title: Re: Eternals
Post by: Rendakor on October 25, 2021, 04:11:28 PM
It's a 75% on Rotten Tomatoes; where are you seeing bad reviews?


Title: Re: Eternals
Post by: Trippy on October 25, 2021, 05:24:52 PM
Metacritic has it at 58 at the moment: https://www.metacritic.com/movie/eternals/critic-reviews


Title: Re: Eternals
Post by: Khaldun on October 26, 2021, 05:53:36 PM
Guardian review was medium-hostile.


Title: Re: Eternals
Post by: Velorath on November 06, 2021, 09:19:51 PM
This is certainly a mess on pretty much any sort of narrative level. All the world-building stuff they have to cram in here, in addition to trying distill around 7000 years of these characters' histories with each other down into a 2.5 hour movie doesn't leave them a lot of room to tell an actual good storyline, even without getting into the fairly bad CG stuff like the Deviants.

That said there were characters and moments I did enjoy here and it didn't feel quite as much of a slog to get through as Thor: Dark World, or as superfluous as Black Widow. You can squint and kinda at least see the ambition of what they were trying for here (and there's absolutely a lot they're going to be building on from this). As a Disney+ show I think this could have actually worked (if they couldn't have gotten Hayek or Jolie for a series that would have only been a plus in this case).

Edit: Just to add, I really liked Brian Tyree Henry and Ma Dong-seok. Lia McHugh did a pretty good job as Sprite which is one of the more challenging roles. Kumail Nanjiani is Kumail Nanjiani. He delivers what you'd expect, but doesn't elevate the movie at all, largely just due to his role. Richard Madden is likewise exactly what you'd expect based on his previous work. Barry Keoghan wasn't working for me at first but he gets better as the movie goes on. Lauren Ridloff as Makkari doesn't get a lot to do but she's fairly solid at least. Gemma Chan is a little vanilla as Sersi.


Title: Re: Eternals
Post by: TheWalrus on November 07, 2021, 09:57:11 PM
I know nothing about Eternals. Is this something they should have tried individual or paired character movies for as introduction, with ye olde team uppe movie to cap it off? There's a fuckton of hero in the trailers.


Title: Re: Eternals
Post by: Velorath on November 07, 2021, 10:42:51 PM
I know nothing about Eternals. Is this something they should have tried individual or paired character movies for as introduction, with ye olde team uppe movie to cap it off? There's a fuckton of hero in the trailers.

I think a Disney+ show would have worked better than setting it up with individual movies. There's a lot of characters, but they have a shared background and history so it's not like they started off separately and came together as a team over the years.


Title: Re: Eternals
Post by: TheWalrus on November 08, 2021, 08:42:50 AM
Ah, ok. Thanks!


Title: Re: Eternals
Post by: Velorath on November 08, 2021, 09:26:44 AM
No problem.

I guess to back it up a little, for people who aren't familiar with the characters (and there are a number of tweaks to the Eternals here even for people who know their comic book counterparts) Eternals get sent to planets by their Space God (one of the Celestials) which are being threated by the Deviants, which here are largely mindless creatures. If you've seen the trailers, whenever they're fighting a big CGI creature, it's a Deviant. This group of Eternals arrived on Earth together around 5,000 BC and are to remain until the Celestials tell them their mission is complete.

That's the basic setup at the start of the movie (there's opening text that explains some of it). There are flashbacks to a number of different time periods that expand on who these characters are and their relationship with each other, and through the course of the movie they also find that there's more to their origins and mission than they're aware.

So the movie has to set up the characters of the 10 Eternals, how they've changed across 7000 years, some information on the Celestials, and the conflict with the Deviants over the period of a 2.5 hour movie. They actually do a somewhat decent job juggling the characters all things considered, but I think had they done it as a 6-8 episode show there was a lot they could have expanded on. One of the bigger problems to me is that they couldn't come up with anything interesting to do with the Deviants. They're largely mindless as mentioned, and the CGI isn't particularly great. They're functionally a plot device and it's not particularly interesting the first time the Eternals fight one, let alone the 6th or 7th time. A series would have also allowed them to do a bit more setup with how they interact with their space god, and so they could explore a little more of how each character feels about what is essentially their religion. Only one Eternal in a group is assigned to have the device that allows them to communicate directly with the Celestial so there's an interesting dynamic there.

Basically there's a lot of big ideas but in trying to cram all of it in they have trouble telling an actual story.


Title: Re: Eternals
Post by: Samwise on November 08, 2021, 09:50:18 AM
Only one Eternal in a group is assigned to have the device that allows them to communicate directly with the Celestial so there's an interesting dynamic there.

Not being at all familiar with the source material, this is how I picture that dynamic:



Title: Re: Eternals
Post by: TheWalrus on November 08, 2021, 12:26:44 PM
Spacepope would need a funny hat to communicate properly.


Title: Re: Eternals
Post by: Khaldun on November 08, 2021, 05:23:52 PM
Neil Gaiman's attempted reboot of the Eternals sort of followed that structure until it just kind of fell apart--the Eternals for whatever reason have lost their memories and integrated into human life as per their individual nature; Ikaris and Makkari have to reawaken each of them one per issue and in a few cases that's actually kind of dangerous, and it's to face a new kind of Deviant threat that has something-something to do with the Celestials. (The Deviants back in the Kirby original are basically just disposable monster goons with a couple of exceptions, and that's never changed much except in Gaiman's reboot.)

In the comics, slowly over time, the Celestials themselves became responsible for the mutant gene--nobody had that idea when they were first integrated into the MU, it just kind of congealed into the mythology in bits and pieces.



Title: Re: Eternals
Post by: Raguel on November 09, 2021, 01:39:11 PM
In the comics, slowly over time, the Celestials themselves became responsible for the mutant gene--nobody had that idea when they were first integrated into the MU, it just kind of congealed into the mythology in bits and pieces.


LOL why has this been my head canon for decades if I never read Gaiman's reboot? Maybe my memory is just bad (I don't think I've read many Eternals books or comics featuring them).


Title: Re: Eternals
Post by: Khaldun on November 09, 2021, 02:58:02 PM
Oh, that part of the canon preceded Gaiman's reboot, and it's been a *really soft* canon thing--most of the work of suggesting it came in the back sections of late issues of What If? where they did in-universe explanations of stuff like "how are the Eternals and the guys on Titan who eventually led to Thanos related," etc. What surprises me about the Eternals film is that it seems like they're going to lean in to that stuff now, when I would have left it the fuck alone if I were them.


Title: Re: Eternals
Post by: eldaec on November 12, 2021, 12:59:51 PM
I know nothing about Eternals. Is this something they should have tried individual or paired character movies for as introduction, with ye olde team uppe movie to cap it off? There's a fuckton of hero in the trailers.

I think a Disney+ show would have worked better than setting it up with individual movies. There's a lot of characters, but they have a shared background and history so it's not like they started off separately and came together as a team over the years.

Looking at the slate of MCU shows disney+ is promoting today it occurred to me that every single one of them is a better idea for a film than Eternals.


Title: Re: Eternals
Post by: schild on November 12, 2021, 09:46:25 PM
I know nothing about Eternals. Is this something they should have tried individual or paired character movies for as introduction, with ye olde team uppe movie to cap it off? There's a fuckton of hero in the trailers.

I think a Disney+ show would have worked better than setting it up with individual movies. There's a lot of characters, but they have a shared background and history so it's not like they started off separately and came together as a team over the years.

Looking at the slate of MCU shows disney+ is promoting today it occurred to me that every single one of them is a better idea for a film than Eternals.

hawkeye would be utterly miserable for a film

it's barely worth a tv show

(eternals was a TERRIBLE idea tho, yeah)


Title: Re: Eternals
Post by: MediumHigh on November 16, 2021, 07:45:48 AM
Oh wow this was really meh. I wanted to say really bad but that would require me to genuinely dislike everything in the movie, which wasn't the case.  I like the lore behind the celestials, I liked that the 7000 year old alien superman who chose the celestial and the infinity of the universe over our mudball, I like the guy who became a bollywood guy as a way to pass the time....but that's about it. 70% of the movie is actors being told to act "normal", which is boring because by making them "average people" you remove anything special about them being "7000 year old aliens".

It just didn't work, too many characters feels kinda of a lazy take, I think its too much nothing going nowhere very slowly. Like too much characters making relatively immature choices, too many attempts to play on big emotions that fall flat the following scene, prime example; a characters so done with humanity that he meets someone a few years before the plot happens and lives in the suburbs. Also said character needs a pep talk to even decide join the plot to not end the world his child and husband are standing on...

I find it more irritating that people give this crap a pass. Shangi Chi maybe objectively one of the worst movies in marvels long stretch of making movies but at least it has something to distract less discerning audiences.... this has nothing. And while it isn't nearly as bad as Shang Chi or Thor 2 or Iron Man 2, it is far more intellectually insulting.

Save for Black Widow, a lot of these movies makes me want to apologize to Captain Marvel.


Title: Re: Eternals
Post by: Velorath on November 16, 2021, 09:22:08 PM
Just incase anybody wants to reassess their desire to watch this, you know if MediumHigh hates it, it must have at least some redeeming qualities.


Title: Re: Eternals
Post by: TheWalrus on November 18, 2021, 11:20:44 PM
He's got an entire vanilla folder where he keeps a record of movies he likes.


Title: Re: Eternals
Post by: MediumHigh on November 19, 2021, 03:43:48 AM
This reminds me of when Game of Thrones entered its  5-6th season. All the T.V fans were calling the book readers nerds for pointing out that seasons 5-6 were pretty bad. Than season 8 happened  :oh_i_see:


Title: Re: Eternals
Post by: Khaldun on November 28, 2021, 05:27:13 PM
Finally saw this.

Quite aside from any nerd-debates it might spawn, it's just not a very good movie. It's not boring the way Thor: Dark World was exactly, but it's got terrible pacing issues and way way way too much to set up. My kid got it right: this would have been a good 8-episode Disney + series. The Deviants were boring visually and were clearly in there just to have some kind of (rather dull and stake-free) fight scenes two or three times in the film before the big twist. Sersi is badly underwritten--her motivations have to carry the major arc of the plot and instead we get a lot of tell, not show--people telling her what she feels rather than seeing her feel it.



Title: Re: Eternals
Post by: Velorath on November 28, 2021, 06:51:00 PM
Finally saw this.

Quite aside from any nerd-debates it might spawn, it's just not a very good movie. It's not boring the way Thor: Dark World was exactly, but it's got terrible pacing issues and way way way too much to set up. My kid got it right: this would have been a good 8-episode Disney + series. The Deviants were boring visually and were clearly in there just to have some kind of (rather dull and stake-free) fight scenes two or three times in the film before the big twist. Sersi is badly underwritten--her motivations have to carry the major arc of the plot and instead we get a lot of tell, not show--people telling her what she feels rather than seeing her feel it.





Title: Re: Eternals
Post by: Khaldun on November 28, 2021, 07:25:57 PM
Ah right. Never read that series.

We were just all dissecting why we were so underwhelmed and we realized that one example of the film's problems
The screenplay needed a major reworking, and they needed to have a much clearer sense of why this film needed to be made. It's not like Iron Man 3 or something where you can largely forget it happened, either, in terms of effects on a shared universe.


Title: Re: Eternals
Post by: Velorath on November 28, 2021, 08:04:31 PM
I think we're ultimately in agreement that it would have worked better as a D+ series. No matter how much they rework the screenplay I just think they're trying to cram way too much into the movie. It's got the Iron Man 2 issue of trying to set up a number of future storylines, while also trying to cram in a dozen more characters and a story that takes place across the entirety of human history.


Title: Re: Eternals
Post by: Rasix on January 19, 2022, 02:04:52 PM
This movie bored the entire family. Just too much shit in it and very little of it was not dull.


Title: Re: Eternals
Post by: Khaldun on January 19, 2022, 05:11:37 PM
Rewatching some of it--I could barely stand it--I flash back to the early part of this thread. I have absolutely no idea what they were thinking now in giving the green light to this. We've gotten used to the idea that Feige et all have a plan, that they're going to pay stuff off, that counter-intuitive moves like "let's make a Guardians of the Galaxy film" fit into an overall vision of things. Even when I'm sure in rewatching that they were completely improvising or guessing--saying "let's make Thor and let's have Branaugh direct it", I could still see an idea somewhere in there. ("Let's depict the Asgardians as advanced aliens, let's put some artifacts in their vaults, let's put SHIELD in the movie".

With this film, I'm basically just, "I have no idea". If the clever long-term plan is introducing Starfox (one of the worst Marvel characters ever), a bad CGI version of Pip the Troll (also very bad--and fuck, just put Patton Oswalt in a loincloth, he's a fine Pip as is), and the Black Knight (another terrible character), I just grind to a halt in terms of being able to understand what they thought this movie was for.


Title: Re: Eternals
Post by: Raguel on January 19, 2022, 06:31:22 PM
I really liked the movie, but then I saw it on Disney+ and not in the theaters.

Pretty sure Starlin made Thanos a deviant.


Title: Re: Eternals
Post by: Setanta on January 19, 2022, 07:32:54 PM
I'm glad I watched it on Disney+. At least this way I don't feel that I lost anything other than a couple of hours of my life. It had potential, but spent too much time telling... and even then the telling was mediocre. I'm not even sure why Jon Snow was in the movie.


Title: Re: Eternals
Post by: HaemishM on January 19, 2022, 08:57:25 PM
Jon Snow was in the movie to be


and potentially set up another team of Avengers. Sersei, Dane Whitman and Starfox/Eros have all been Avengers at one point.


Title: Re: Eternals
Post by: Teleku on January 19, 2022, 09:15:40 PM
The only amusement I got from the film was the fact there was a woman named Sersi banging both Rob and Jon Stark.  Sure that was somebodies fanfic back in the 90's.


Title: Re: Eternals
Post by: Sky on January 20, 2022, 06:51:15 AM
It was fine as a free movie, a solid mediocre DC flick. I liked the handling of the Celestials in general but this was a mess of trying to throw together a framework in the most uninteresting and generic way possible. Worse, because there was a lot of good ways you could have approached some of these characters, and they actually hit on some of those threads but lost them in the midst of trying to do too much. In all, I was pleasantly surprised after Shang-Chi.

The Black Knight stuff was handled so hamfistedly, exacerbated by seeing it after the setup for the Swordsman.


Title: Re: Eternals
Post by: Khaldun on January 20, 2022, 11:50:05 AM
Thanos' route to being an Eternal (or an Eternal with a Deviant nature) in the comics is actually a pretty tortured one in continuity terms. Starlin set up an advanced civilization on Titan that descended from a god-like figure on Earth named Kronos who is sort of? a Greek Titan only not actually of the Greek pantheon. He develops an immortality serum of some kind, it blows up, his spirit becomes one with the universe, and then his two sons have to decide who will rule. One of the is later on depicted as Zuras, the head of the Eternals (but Starlin didn't do that in the original story that introduced Thanos), the other one, A'lars, decides to leave Earth so there is no rivalry. On Titan he finds the remains of an advanced civilization with one surviving woman and together they repopulate the civilization. Yeah yeah I know genetic bottleneck etc. really makes no sense but ok. A'lars renames himself Mentor (clearly a very modest guy) and then he has two sons, Eros and Thanos. (In some sense, everyone on Titan is his child, but I think there was some woo-woo handwaving about most of them having been created by cloning and advanced technology as opposed to A'lars and his wife boning.)

There was a series of stories in the backpages of What If? that weren't "what ifs" but were "untold stories of the Marvel Universe" where Roy Thomas continued at trying to make the Eternals fit into the MU and that's where he decided that Starlin's characters were in fact Eternals and fiddled a bit with Starlin's old stories to make that work. Then when Eros was in the Avengers, he met the Eternals on Earth and discovered very much to his surprise that he was also an Eternal, which he didn't know before because his dad didn't ever talk about the Old Days.

(I see that in the MCU, they've apparently already decided that A'lars is in fact Thanos' father but that Eros is an "adopted Eternal", hence Thanos isn't actually an Eternal.)


Title: Re: Eternals
Post by: Threash on January 21, 2022, 02:19:12 PM
Finally caught this on Disney+, it was not as terrible as I thought it would be but it wasn't great. I loved a lot of less standard super hero movie decisions they made, like having a guy just peace out because he agrees with the bad guys but doesn't want to fight his friends. Also the fact that you can easily argue that the good guys are objectively wrong. That said calling it a DC movie is the perfect criticism, they expect us to care about this characters and their relationships without having given us any reason to. It also suffers from being part of the MCU, if you need sentient life to awaken Celestials it makes ZERO sense to ignore Thanos or any of the other universe level threats we've seen already like Ego or even Hela. That cliffhanger ending is a bit silly when stopping Thanos is the perfect answer as to whether they earned it or not. Instead this movie should have taken place in the middle ages and ended with Arishem watching the Endgame events unfold and going "ok fine", and letting them go back to Earth.


Title: Re: Eternals
Post by: eldaec on January 21, 2022, 02:30:14 PM
Holy shit this was bad.

I'd say hopefully they will never speak of any of this ever again. But I assume the whole ring motif is supposed to connect into the ten rings?


Title: Re: Eternals
Post by: Khaldun on January 21, 2022, 04:15:13 PM
Maybe? That's the major question hanging out there now, I guess: what were the rings calling to at the end of Shang-Chi?

My money is on Galactus: I think Arishem off-screen decides that Earth needs to be greased because it subverted an entire cadre of Eternals.


Title: Re: Eternals
Post by: eldaec on January 23, 2022, 02:55:08 AM
At this point the big red rock guy seems much more likely to me.


Title: Re: Eternals
Post by: HaemishM on January 23, 2022, 09:04:46 AM
We know that Kang is going to be one of the big bads from this cycle, and there are hints of Dr. Doom out there as well (poster in Moon Knight trailer). Both of those have been villains associated with the Fantastic Four (Kang in his Immortus phase moreso than Kang but still), so Galactus seems like a sure thing.


Title: Re: Eternals
Post by: Threash on January 23, 2022, 11:43:38 AM
(poster in Moon Knight trailer)

Ohh, what is this about?


Title: Re: Eternals
Post by: Khaldun on January 23, 2022, 12:34:44 PM
There's a box behind Oscar Isaac when he's in a truck and holding a gun where you can see a stylized logo on the box--looks like a company logo--that says Von D with the rest of the word being cut off by the car seat in front of the box.



Title: Re: Eternals
Post by: slog on January 23, 2022, 03:40:17 PM
I tried watching this movie before reading this  thread.  Shut it off when Angela Jolie had an Alzheimer's attack during a battle with the very boring  Deviant things.

Do they ever explain how the Deviants evolved without being noticed?  I assume it would take 1000 generations to evolve like that. Did no one notice they were breeding?  What do they eat? 


Title: Re: Eternals
Post by: HaemishM on January 23, 2022, 03:53:07 PM
They were apparently hidden under the polar ice caps, that are now melting because of global warming.


Title: Re: Eternals
Post by: Khaldun on January 23, 2022, 05:26:49 PM
It's a kind of dumb variant on the Vorlon-Shadow conflict in Babylon 5--in this version, the Deviants are meant to test sapient life so it can get to the point of nurturing a Celestial's Emergence, but, uh. life finds a way, and so since the Deviants are alive (and the Eternals are not), they have a tendency to do more than just challenge sapient life and make it get to the point of nurturing a Celestial, they tend to overwhelming evolving intelligences and kill them. So the Eternals are like an immune system in this reading--they keep the Deviants in check.

It's a dumb rejiggering of the whole idea as it appears in Marvel comics. In the comics, the Celestials are like any other very very powerful god/divine being--we really don't know, after decades of storytelling, exactly what it is that they're hoping will happen because of their tinkering with intelligent species. That seems like a much better idea.

Though at this point with the comics, the entire multiverse--ALL of creation--has been destroyed once and saved basically by Doctor Doom, Doctor Strange and the Molecule Man murdering multiversal beings bent on killing everything and then Reed Richards using Doom's power to recreate everything all over again. The Infinity Gems were involved, sort of? I'd almost think at this point that the Celestials, the Infinity Gems, all that shit, is a kind of "in case of emergency, pull lever" thing that the universe creates in itself--giving ordinary intelligent beings the ability if necessary to repair all of creation or reboot it. Or it's just stupid cheat codes.

How this reconciles with a universe that also canonically has angels and God (Ghost Rider among other books has confirmed that) I dunno; the Marvel Universe's "God" and angels are at least slightly less involved or interventional than the DC Universe, which has the Voice of God pretty routinely getting involved in shit.


Title: Re: Eternals
Post by: SurfD on January 23, 2022, 09:48:18 PM
How this reconciles with a universe that also canonically has angels and God (Ghost Rider among other books has confirmed that) I dunno; the Marvel Universe's "God" and angels are at least slightly less involved or interventional than the DC Universe, which has the Voice of God pretty routinely getting involved in shit.

My last "wiki deep dive" through Marvel Cosmological shit after watching Eternals and deciding to "catch up" on what was up seems to indicate that the Marvel "universe" is pretty "weird and complicated".

Basically, from what I remember, the most "current" setup is something like this:                          
- At the beginning of everything there was one "Prime" Universe:  A single, Sentient "Universe".  No multiverse existed, nothing ELSE existed, just it.                          
- It got lonely, and created 2 groups of servants: Aspirants and Celestials.
- The Aspirants served it unconditionally.  Worshipped it like devoted slave cultists.
- The Celesitals on the other hand, decided the best way to serve it was to emulate it: Create new life and "test" that life to weed out imperfections and ensure that only "superior" new life emerged.

Things get complicated from here, because:        
- The Aspirants and the Celestials eventually have some kind of falling out, a giant war occurs between the two, and in the process, they end up using weapons so powerful they almost "kill" the "Prime" universe.
- 99% of the Celestials and Aspriants are wiped out in the war, and the "Prime" universe flees beyond the edges of reality to recover from it's wounds.  The surviving aspirants go with it, while the surviving Celestials remain.
- The material left behind from the wounded "Prime" Universe eventually coalesces into a sentient Universe of its own, which takes on the name "Eternity", becoming, in effect, the very First "Marvel Multiverse".   The remaining Celestials "inhabit" Eternity at this point, continuing their experiments with creating and testing life.

Eternity has some kind of Phoenix like lifecycle (similar to our theory of a Big Bang / Big Collapse cycle) where it grows, develops, collapses, incorporates all the development from the current cycle and then begins a new cycle.

The "Marvel Universe" most of us are familiar with was supposed to be the 7th cycle.  Galactus was a remnant of the 6th cycle, basically the last survivor of that cycle who was empowered with specific purpose as some kind of special Cosmic Entity and reborn into the next one.   It's never explicitly stated, but I assume that the Celestials survive by "fleeing" outside of the bounds of Eternity during the collapse and then return once the next cycle has begun.

As far as "gods" goes though, it's entirely a "perspective" thing.   Marvel has pantheons of "gods" that generally follow current culture, like the Norse, Olympian, Egyptian, etc gods, but they are more just super advanced civilizations that LOOK like gods when normal humans encounter them so end up being worshipped as such.   On the other hand, it's also explicitly noted that there are "extra dimensional" entities from places that aren't considered part of the actual Marvel "Universe" that is made up by Eternity (beings such as Dormamu and the Elder Gods / Old Gods like Cyttorak and Shuma-gorath) as well as beings that exist outside of reality (such as the creators of the Cosmic Cubes).  So it's entirely possible that actual "Gods" (in the way we think of as Deities, rather than, say, just advanced beings like the Azguardians who are just treated like gods) could exist and exert their influences on the "Universe" from extradimensional planes not directly part of Eternity.


Title: Re: Eternals
Post by: Velorath on January 23, 2022, 09:52:33 PM
How this reconciles with a universe that also canonically has angels and God (Ghost Rider among other books has confirmed that) I dunno; the Marvel Universe's "God" and angels are at least slightly less involved or interventional than the DC Universe, which has the Voice of God pretty routinely getting involved in shit.


The Marvel Universe can't even reconcile Ghost Rider canon with itself.


Title: Re: Eternals
Post by: Draegan on January 24, 2022, 05:57:28 AM
Finally caught this on Disney+, it was not as terrible as I thought it would be but it wasn't great. I loved a lot of less standard super hero movie decisions they made, like having a guy just peace out because he agrees with the bad guys but doesn't want to fight his friends. Also the fact that you can easily argue that the good guys are objectively wrong. That said calling it a DC movie is the perfect criticism, they expect us to care about this characters and their relationships without having given us any reason to. It also suffers from being part of the MCU, if you need sentient life to awaken Celestials it makes ZERO sense to ignore Thanos or any of the other universe level threats we've seen already like Ego or even Hela. That cliffhanger ending is a bit silly when stopping Thanos is the perfect answer as to whether they earned it or not. Instead this movie should have taken place in the middle ages and ended with Arishem watching the Endgame events unfold and going "ok fine", and letting them go back to Earth.

If population is the only metric to feeding celestials, then Thanos killing half the people isn't a big deal. The population of the earth basically doubled in the last 50 years. I think Celestials don't mind waiting 50 more years since they are basically immortal.

I thought the movie was just ok. It was saved quite a bit with the credit scenes. The story itself was pretty meh - like a big celestial coming out of the earth and Bruce Banner and some of the others are just fucking off doing nothing.


Title: Re: Eternals
Post by: Threash on January 24, 2022, 06:23:05 AM
The story itself was pretty meh - like a big celestial coming out of the earth and Bruce Banner and some of the others are just fucking off doing nothing.

That part didn't really bother me that much, the entire thing took like five minutes between the volcano explosion and the hand coming out of the earth. There was literally nobody that could have made it there.


Title: Re: Eternals
Post by: Khaldun on January 24, 2022, 08:35:52 AM
Definitely there's a weird relationship here with Thanos.

The Celestials in the MCU as of this film are awfully similar to Galactus in their MO: they need the specific energies of large number of sapient beings in order to create a new Celestial, and the Celestials then keep the universe in some kind of energetic balance so that everything doesn't just run down to entropy.

Thanos wants to cut populations in half everywhere ostensibly so that everybody gets more resources or something like that. Only now it kind of seems like he might actually have been preserving huge numbers of sapient species from having their planets blown up by emerging Celestials. Maybe even on purpose, e.g., Thanos knew exactly what he was really doing. Maybe he was building the Gauntlet because otherwise the Celestials were going to send a bunch of Eternals to grease him due to the number of planets where he'd kept the sapient population low enough to keep a Celestial from popping.


Title: Re: Eternals
Post by: MahrinSkel on January 24, 2022, 09:55:07 AM
It just felt...off. Like it was Inhumans or New Mutants, somebody doing things off the Feige reservation that was pre-ordained to be memory holed and never spoken of again. Except he was involved and it's supposedly canon, so wtf?

That's a lot of A and B list stars that probably didn't sign multi-appearance contracts. So, Iceland has some really weird mountains now, Celestials are a Thing, and none of the rest will be mentioned ever again.

--Dave


Title: Re: Eternals
Post by: Khaldun on January 24, 2022, 12:04:11 PM
Yeah. Honestly I wouldn't mind it if the Guardians of the Galaxy accidentally knocked the space-travelling Eternals into a volcano because of the backwash from their ship, we just forget about Arishem, and the Black Knight gets vampire-murdered in the first 10 minutes of Blade.


Title: Re: Eternals
Post by: eldaec on January 24, 2022, 04:06:35 PM
Do they ever explain how the Deviants evolved without being noticed?  I assume it would take 1000 generations to evolve like that. Did no one notice they were breeding?  What do they eat? 

Seriously. It's a comic book movie. Evolution is not even a generational process in comic book movies it just happens at random like they are pokemon or something.


Title: Re: Eternals
Post by: Setanta on January 25, 2022, 05:18:31 AM
Yeah. Honestly I wouldn't mind it if the Guardians of the Galaxy accidentally knocked the space-travelling Eternals into a volcano because of the backwash from their ship, we just forget about Arishem, and the Black Knight gets vampire-murdered in the first 10 minutes of Blade.


I'm with you in this. I finished the film just not caring about the storyline, characters or plot. There was no real investment and certainly no payoff. Definitely the worst Marvel film by far. I'd pay to watch your resolution though.


Title: Re: Eternals
Post by: slog on January 25, 2022, 06:24:27 AM
Do they ever explain how the Deviants evolved without being noticed?  I assume it would take 1000 generations to evolve like that. Did no one notice they were breeding?  What do they eat?  

Seriously. It's a comic book movie. Evolution is not even a generational process in comic book movies it just happens at random like they are pokemon or something.

You are right, but I felt it was a big hole in the story that I couldn't get past.

Edit: As I think on it more, it's because they were boring, like robots.


Title: Re: Eternals
Post by: Sky on January 25, 2022, 09:22:26 AM
i actually thought Arishem was a great visual and good villain in the Timekeepers vein, a big bad that mostly stays off-camera. I think its character design and implementation is probably the strongest part of the movie.

On reflection, Jolie's character is sticking with me, but more as a failure to grasp a really strong tragic role. Mostly because it kinda got swept and buried and rushed like everything in this long ass movie. But I could see a good story just isolating her struggle as a broken doll of a war god.


Title: Re: Eternals
Post by: Khaldun on January 25, 2022, 09:25:45 AM
I like her intensity and excitement at getting to fight Ikaris where Jolie manages to get across very clearly that her character has been thinking about who would win for centuries.


Title: Re: Eternals
Post by: HaemishM on January 25, 2022, 07:22:08 PM
They really did have too many characters to give any of them enough depth to fill a thimble.


Title: Re: Eternals
Post by: Khaldun on January 26, 2022, 10:51:26 AM
I do find that some of them are kind of memorable. Thena has immortal's Alzheimers; Gilgamesh takes care of her and is big and strong. Druig is the mind-controlling cult angry guy. Ikaris is the eyebeam guy played by Robb Stark who turns out to be a treacherous cunt. There's the guy who makes machines. There's, um, the one who doesn't grow up.

The odd thing is that I can barely remember Sersi at all and she's got tons of screen time. And I have to really work to remember Selma Hayek despite all of them saying she's important. I barely remember Makkari and I barely remember the guy who is the Bollywood actor--they just don't register as characters despite having defining schticks or a significant scene or two.


Title: Re: Eternals
Post by: Abagadro on February 20, 2022, 02:34:16 PM
Finally saw this and thought it was a snore (watched Edge of Tomorrow directly after to palate cleanse).

Besides too many characters, a lot of the powers were just kinda stupid.  Pew-Pew Shooty Hands, Punchy Hands, wound healing, etc.  If you are basically a god custom making these bots, why not just give each of them all the powers?


Title: Re: Eternals
Post by: Khaldun on February 20, 2022, 07:01:13 PM
Yeah. In the comics, all the Eternals (who are not androids or whatever, they're just genetically altered humans who are effectively immortal) have the same baseline powers: they're all strong, I think all of them can fly, they all have some kind of energy manipulation, they're all immortal. For the most part if they have extra powers it's because they're immortal and have spent time focusing on that baseline to add more--Sersi's learned to do matter manipulation, Druig has learned to manipulate minds, Phastos is just a genius with technology, Makkari has invested his mental energies in speed, Ikaris has built up his strength. It's less "I made them this way" and more "After 5,000 years of Genetically Perfected Peleton Training".


Title: Re: Eternals
Post by: schild on February 20, 2022, 09:22:53 PM
Quote
"After 5,000 years of Genetically Perfected Peleton Training"

this would've been a better movie


Title: Re: Eternals
Post by: eldaec on February 21, 2022, 01:15:37 AM
They really did have too many characters to give any of them enough depth to fill a thimble.

You say that, but the film makes it abundantly clear that everyone except Robb Stark and Cersei are side plots.

I think the main issues are that Stark is an unrelatable asshole, and Sersi lacks any personality or characterisation once we stop following the other cooler Sersi who was living her best life in London. Fix those two characters and the side quest gang wouldn't matter so much.

I liked the Bollywood guy though.


Title: Re: Eternals
Post by: Khaldun on February 21, 2022, 06:08:06 AM
Sersi in the comics is a party-hard bon vivant who travels all over and is perfectly happy to play at being a menacing sorceress when it suits her to do so. Ikaris is a boring stiff in the comics, so they got that much right, but yeah, basically having both Sersi and Ikaris be boring, muted, etc. just killed the film's energy.