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Author Topic: Eternals  (Read 20935 times)
TheWalrus
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Reply #70 on: November 18, 2021, 11:20:44 PM

He's got an entire vanilla folder where he keeps a record of movies he likes.

vanilla folders - MediumHigh
MediumHigh
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Reply #71 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  Ohhhhh, I see.
Khaldun
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Reply #72 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.

Velorath
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Reply #73 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.



Khaldun
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Reply #74 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.
Velorath
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Reply #75 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.
Rasix
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Reply #76 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.

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Khaldun
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Reply #77 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.
Raguel
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Reply #78 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.
Setanta
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Reply #79 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.

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Reply #80 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.

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Reply #81 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.

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Sky
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Reply #82 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.
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Reply #83 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.)
Threash
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Reply #84 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.

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eldaec
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Reply #85 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?

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Khaldun
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Reply #86 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.
eldaec
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Reply #87 on: January 23, 2022, 02:55:08 AM

At this point the big red rock guy seems much more likely to me.

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HaemishM
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Reply #88 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.

Threash
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Reply #89 on: January 23, 2022, 11:43:38 AM

(poster in Moon Knight trailer)

Ohh, what is this about?

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Khaldun
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Reply #90 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.

slog
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Reply #91 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? 

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HaemishM
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Reply #92 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.

Khaldun
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Reply #93 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.
SurfD
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Reply #94 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.
« Last Edit: January 23, 2022, 09:57:33 PM by SurfD »

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Velorath
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Reply #95 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.
Draegan
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Reply #96 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.
Threash
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Reply #97 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.

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Khaldun
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Reply #98 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.
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Reply #99 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.

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Khaldun
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Reply #100 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.
eldaec
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Reply #101 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.

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Setanta
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Reply #102 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.

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slog
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Reply #103 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.
« Last Edit: January 25, 2022, 06:26:13 AM by slog »

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Sky
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Reply #104 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.
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