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Eternals

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Eternals is a big, jam-packed movie that I enjoyed but I can’t help feeling it would have been better as a series than a film. We have no less than ten Eternals who are, notionally at least, new characters, plus their powers, a small supporting cast, villains, 7,000 years of family dynamics and a smattering of sampling of 7,000 years of human history too.

If you’re up on your Greek and Middle Eastern mythology there are relatively few surprises here. A lot of us will probably recognise Circe, Icarus, Ajax, Athena, Mercury and Hephaestus. Some of us will recognise Gilgamesh. If you dig through the terrible spelling you might find yourself wondering if Ahriman is really there too, if you’re really hot on these things. According to Wikipedia these are all decisions made by the original Marvel writers, faithfully transferred to film, but man, it broke any sense of twist or tension in the plot for me. I should point out that they change the names, Sersei not Circe for example, and they play with the attributes and legends, Thena has lost her A and her aspect as Goddess of Wisdom for example.

That familiarity helped me keep track of the characters and the bulk of their powers, and the few I couldn’t place were easy enough to keep track of. However, the story of their dynamics, who loves whom, who knows what and when and so on is sufficiently dense that I kind of believe there’s 7,000 years of history and I’d have liked more time to see it developed. Likewise, although I enjoyed the idea of the dips into history we saw (although the invention of the plough predates Hephaestus “gifting” it to mankind by 1500 years, oops), they’re oddly structured and placed - they needed a bit more time to tell a story instead of be a set piece action spectacle that feels dropped in.

All this sounds super-critical. As a series, with time to expand the relationships, to have the flashbacks properly serve a story meaning - which one of them did - this could have been excellent. As it was, it was merely good. That said, this was good enough I didn’t realise it was over 2.5 hours long as I was watching it.

If you’ve never seen another MCU movie, Eternals is a fine place to start in some respects. There are no characters here from the rest of the MCU, nothing demanded of you. On the other hand, while I haven’t analysed what makes a Marvel superhero movie, this isn’t it. I think that’s good, I think the MCU formula is tired, predictable and panders really to middle America in depressing ways. Why has it taken so long for Black Widow to appear - even before Covid pushed it back further? How many Iron Man, Captain America and Thor movies have we had, before we had a female lead? Shang-Chi then gave us our first POC as a lead. Eternals smashes all of that wide open. Multiple POC, a WOC as the lead, a deaf superhero (played by a deaf actor), an openly gay (absolutely unequivocally openly gay, kisses his husband full on the lips) superhero. Watching the film it didn’t feel like they said “let’s have one so we we can tick every diversity box out there” because they all felt like real, organic characters in the whole. But a little cynical part of brain wonders, thinking afterwards as I was organising my ideas for this review. Having said that, if you like accents, we’ve got a real smorgasbord, with English, Scottish and Irish if you look at just the British ones, and Indian and American English for the other native dialects. We’ve got a few non-native speakers too, just for extra fun. Before you go too far with the warm fuzzies, all the male Eternals have a directly combat applicable super-power. Some of the female ones do, but mostly they have controller or defender powers rather than aggressive ones. Very progressive. It’s also worth noting hat casting an Pakistani-American to play an Indian is really showing a good grasp of international politics, especially on a day when Hindu nationalists have increased their attacks on Muslims following Pakistan beating India in the cricket T20 World Cup. Hollywood continues to have an issue with actors of Middle Eastern origin too. Gilgamesh, Babylonian hero is portrayed by a Korean actor. Nothing against him, actually I think he was a good fit to the role, but he’s not very Babylonian.

Apparently Middle America doesn’t like this. While I think it could be better, I do. Fun, but you have to pay attention.

Bechdel Test: Pass. There are a load of female Eternals and they discuss all kinds of things. Very few of them are men. Tactics for fighting deviants is the most obvious.

Ko Test: Pass. Circe, Mercury and Ajax (with apologies for the spelling in the traditional form) are all WOC. Circe and Ajax have traditional speaking roles. Mercury is deaf and speaks in ASL. The spirit of the test is about not speaking English to show they’re second-class citizens. While there is a whole complex debate around disability rights and deaf people being second class citizens, Mercury is decidedly not second class within her peer group. Ask [spoilers] just how good she can be in a fight for example…

Koeze-Dottle Test: Fail. This kind of surprised me, there are clearly a lot of scenes which are pretty balanced for gender, but a lot of voices floating around for cgi characters are male and there’s just enough imbalance at other places that it fails.

Russo Test: Pass. I’ve already given this one away but it’s nice to see at long fucking last. It’s only a bit more than the bare minimum but, in terms of screen time allowed, my internal clock says it’s the second most developed and it may even be the single most developed romantic relationship. It’s delivered in two big chunks that make it feel meaty and meaningful. I looked and said “guy and his husband” but I appreciate not everyone will. The other bits of the story tied around this could easily have been a wife telling her husband to go to war, but it totally works as a husband telling his husband to do it.



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