“Eternals” was released on Nov. 5 of this year with quite a mixed reception.
Directed by award-winning filmmaker, Chloé Zhao, it is the second to last Marvel movie to come out in 2021 followed by “Spiderman: No Way Home” in December.
I went and saw it this weekend with a few of my friends. Here are my thoughts.
Let’s start with the things that I liked. The visual effects were amazing just like most Marvel movies. So no real surprise there.
The humor was well placed in my opinion, not too much and not too little. Just the right amount to remind you that it is a Marvel movie.
I was worried that the pacing would be off, and by proxy, the plot would be difficult to follow but I was pleasantly surprised.
I felt like I knew what was going on for the entirety of the film, which is impressive considering that Chloé Zhao had to bring in 10 characters in one movie. It is not perfect, but it’s not a bother either.
I was pleasantly surprised to see Don Lee as Gilgamesh as I really like his performance both here and in “Train to Busan”. I think that the scenes that he’s in are pretty good.
Those were all great but let’s get into some of the things that I did not like.
I was not really impressed with how Sprite was handled as a character. In my opinion, she really was not given much of a showcase in the finale. With that combined with not the best performance from Lia McHugh, I think Sprite as a character fell flat in this movie.
In the final act it seems like the Eternals make a poor plan which I think is bad writing. They wound up doing the typical improvised plan anyway, so I guess it was fine.
One of the villains just kind of gets stomped on in the final act and only exists to pull some of the characters away from the main plot. This kind of stinks because he was really cool in the comics.
The movie was 2 and a half hours, which is long but I can not dock points from the film too much because “Avenger: Infinity War” was longer and so was the Snyder Cut of Justice League.
I do have to complain about the pacing. There is a large number of flashbacks, especially at the beginning of the movie. I know it can’t really be helped because we are introducing 10 Marvel characters into the movie but it is still kind of annoying.
Some of the performances were patchy at times. More scenes that required more body language than speaking is what I felt suffered the most.
I do not want to say that the movie is perfect but I do not think that it is fair to say that it was bad either. I do feel it’s different from any other Marvel movie in a good way.
I do not think that this movie is in the running for best superhero movie of 2021.
Overall, I would give this movie a recommendation, but it’s not perfect.
