Eternals is a New Low for the MCU

 Almost two years ago I ranked all the Marvel movies to that point and slated Thor: Ragnarok as the worst one.  Few would agree with that, but I really hated the shift in tone and ruining one of Marvel's better comic book stories in the last 20 years.  But after watching Eternals on Disney+ we have a new "winner" for the worst of the MCU.

Admittedly there were a couple of things that hurt my viewing for this.  One was I was kinda grumpy--big surprise.  And two, as I mentioned at the start of the year, I had read three volumes of comics from three different eras:  the original by Jack Kirby, a 2000s reboot by Neil Gaiman, and the most current reboot by Kieren Gillen.  It turns out that was a bad idea because this movie is not faithful to those comics almost entirely.  And a lot of what they changed wasn't really for the better.

Like The Last Jedi, a lot of the people who hate it are probably hating it for racist and misogynist reasons.  I don't really care that they changed the gender and race of some of the characters.  Though I don't understand why they made Ajak the head of the Eternals when in the comics it was Zuras--aka Zeus.  He was a guy but then so was Ajak so they still could have gender swapped it.  Maybe it's because in the comics Thena--aka Athena--is Zuras's daughter so they maybe didn't want people thinking that.

Anyway, I was more annoyed at how they changed some of the characters' personalities and powers, especially Sersi--aka Circe, the witch in The Odyssey who turns Odysseus's guys into pigs.  In the comics--all of them I read--she's confident and mischievous, sort of like Loki.  But in this she's just a dull, not confident schoolteacher.  And for some reason she can't change anything living, just inanimate stuff.  So this Sersi can't even do the thing that Circe is best known for!?  WTF?

Ikaris--aka Icarus, who was not really a god or demigod, just some kid whose wings melted when he flew too high--was more like the comics I read in that he is kind of an arrogant dick.  But he wasn't really capable of the kind of deception and deviousness of this version of the character.

Sprite they more or less got right, though like Sersi she's a little more mischievous in the comics I read than in this.  But at least there were no awkward scenes of Ikaris trying to spank her.

Besides not being Zuras's daughter, they made Thena basically have dementia when her memories weren't erased after thousands of years.  Other than that she can create a spear out of air and twirls around fighting stuff.  Why did they get Anjelina Jolie to play a fairly unimportant character like this?

Druig they got completely wrong as in most of the comics I read he's not a good guy.  In most of them he's a scheming villain type.  He's the one who should have been the traitor, but maybe the writers figured that was too obvious.

Makkari wasn't deaf in the comics I read but otherwise there wasn't much to say about her in this movie.  She's deaf and she has super-speed and she was just hanging around their ship a while.  The end.  Phastos was pretty much like the more recent comics I read, though he was a traitor in that.  I don't remember Kingo at all in any of the comics, though if he were in them I doubt he would be a Bollywood actor.  He was probably in the comics, but like with this movie he just wasn't important enough to remember.

So as you can see reading the comics put me at a disadvantage because they pretty much threw most of that out the window.

Mostly I found it really dull, lacking a lot of the "fun" that people love to crow about with MCU movies--even ones like Infinity War or Endgame that are not fun at all.  There's some slogging through a bastardized version of history that leads to the modern-day problem where apparently Earth is just a giant incubator for a Celestial.

In the comics I read, Deviants were a race that was just as intelligent as humans or Eternals (in the most recent comics Thena even has a history of fucking them), but in this they're reduced to mini-kaiju from Pacific Rim things.  At least until one absorbs Ajak's power and then they get smarter.  Maybe the writers thought a race of people living underground was too corny. 

Instead of Jack Kirby's original version of the Celestials making three essentially equal races--Eternals, humans, Deviants--in this the Deviants were made to clear away any predators from Earth and then the Eternals were made to kill the Deviants.  It's like the Deviants were cats brought in to kill rats in a house and then the Eternals were dogs brought in to kill the cats.  And humans just sort of happened but our presence helps the Celestial grow...somehow.  Wouldn't the Celestial have grown better on a lifeless world like Venus?  There'd be a lot of heat and pressure to incubate it.  Or why not a gas giant like Jupiter, Saturn, or Uranus? (Pause for snickering.)

Anyway, as the time comes near for the Celestial to be born (thus destroying Earth) Ajak was having second thoughts and so Ikaris killed her and gave her power to the Deviants to distract the other Eternals.  Sprite helped him because she loves Ikaris and since she can't grow up she wants to die or reboot or something.  And meanwhile as earthquakes and stuff rock the planet, the Avengers and the roughly 200 other superheroes on Earth spring into action, right?  No?  Someone paged Captain Marvel, right?  No?  Really?  There's not a single cameo at all?  Huh.  Weird.

But never fear, because they use the Uni-Mind (something pretty common in the comics) to boost Sersi enough that she can save the day.  Or whatever.  But then the head Celestial abducts three of them so like Q in "Encounter at Farpoint" he can judge humanity, which unfortunately sets up a sequel.  Ugh.  And that sequel includes Thanos's brother Eros who is just some redheaded guy, not a big purple monster.  So maybe they're brothers from another mother?

Kit Harrington plays Sersi's boyfriend, who's supposed to become the Black Knight.  I assumed that he would be the new guy to join the crew who would serve as our introduction to all the Eternals stuff.  Sort of like in Hellboy where that guy gets hired to be Hellboy's new handler to introduce us to all that.  Or in the first GI Joe movie where Duke and Ripcord get brought in as newbs to introduce us to all the GI Joe stuff.  But instead...he really does nothing.  He's not even in most of the movie, including all the fights at the end.  It's only in a cookie scene that he's even going to get out his cursed sword thing.

For the most part I found it dull and plodding, the kind of dull where I paused it at one point and groaned because there were still 51 minutes left.  It was not fun.  It was not really faithful to the comics--not just for "woke" reasons.  And since most of this next Marvel Phase seems about multiverses and time travel and shit, I'm not sure what it even adds to the overall MCU.  So it was a big, dull waste of time.

Really since this came out so deep into the MCU they should have gone with Neil Gaiman's take on it where the Eternals were living as normal humans because they couldn't remember their past thanks to Sprite.  That would have helped to explain why they hadn't done anything about Thanos or the Chitari invasion or any of that shit.  It also could have made it a little more grounded in reality.  I'm just saying.

(Fun Fact:  Apparently Superman exists in the MCU--at least the comics or movies or whatever.  That seems kind of odd to give a shout-out to a rival company's hero.  Aren't there any other flying, laser eye heroes in the MCU?  Since they haven't brought in Hyperion--aka Marvel's Superman--I guess not.)