Eternals (2021) Review
1 / 10
Official trailer
I’ve watched Eternals once. The 1 is for one of the worst Marvel Cinematic Universe entries, redeemed only by specific sequences involving the Celestials that work at higher craft level than the surrounding material. The film is the Phase Four MCU’s clearest example of decorative diversity-casting failing to compensate for structural storytelling problems, philosophical incoherence, character development absent across a two-hour-thirty-seven-minute runtime, and the wider franchise’s loss of editorial discipline. The 1 acknowledges what the Celestial sequences accomplish while honoring what the rest of the film fails to deliver.
The film also represents the wider Phase Four pattern of MCU productions that prioritize political optics over storytelling craft.
The decorative-diversity framing dominates the marketing, the character introductions, and the narrative structure. The actual storytelling collapses underneath these priorities. The pattern would compound across later Phase Four entries before producing the catastrophic commercial failures of 2022 and 2023.
Two hours and thirty-seven minutes is a long time to spend with ten people I never got to know.
I kept waiting for Eternals to hand me one character I could care about, and it never did. The Celestials wake me up every time they fill the screen, and then the film drags me back to somebody explaining a relationship I was supposed to feel already. A 1 is where it belongs: a few minutes of Kirby-sized wonder floating in a sea of homework.
The Setup
Ten Eternals, immortal beings created by the Celestials to protect humanity from creatures called Deviants, have lived on Earth for seven thousand years. They haven’t interfered with human conflicts (including World War II) because their assignment was Deviant elimination. The Deviants were apparently eradicated centuries ago, leading the Eternals to disperse across the planet and assume human identities while waiting for further instructions from their Celestial creator Arishem.
The story opens in present-day with the apparent reappearance of Deviants, prompting the scattered Eternals to reassemble.
The investigation reveals that the Eternals’ original mission has been a deception. The Celestials use planets as gestation sites for their own offspring. The energy generated by the planet’s accumulated intelligent life is the gestational fuel. The Eternals were created to protect humanity from external threats only so that humanity could grow into a population large enough to power the eventual birth of a new Celestial from Earth.
The “emergence” of the new Celestial would destroy Earth in the process. The Eternals must decide whether to follow their original programming or rebel against their Celestial creators to save humanity.
The Celestials
The Celestials are the film’s actual achievement. The visual design of these planet-scale beings draws on Jack Kirby’s cosmic art from his 1970s Marvel Comics work. The scale is staggering.
The aesthetic is alien. The single sequences in which Arishem appears to Ikaris or the film depicts the wider Celestial cosmology contain more imaginative imagery than the rest of the runtime combined.
The cosmic mythology the film introduces has real potential. The premise that planets are gestation sites for godlike beings, that intelligent life is incidental to the cosmic reproduction cycle, that the universe works on scales humans can’t meaningfully comprehend: all of this is the kind of cosmic-scale science fiction that Marvel Comics has produced reliably for decades and that mainstream cinema rarely attempts. The Celestial sequences honor this material with suitable visual ambition.
Overall, the film fails to integrate the Celestial material with the human-scale drama the rest of the script attempts. The Celestial sequences work at one craft level. The Eternals character drama works at considerably lower craft level. The transitions between tones are awkward. The audience receives cosmic imagery that demands processing as deep and then character drama that demands processing as personal, with insufficient connective tissue between the two tones. The Celestial sequences alone might have justified a considerably higher rating.
Those Celestial scenes are the only reason the number isn’t zero. When Arishem looms over Ikaris, I feel the scale Kirby drew, and I wanted a whole film built at that size. What I got was a few minutes of it, stranded inside a production that keeps pulling me back down to watch people talk about feelings the script never earned.
For Writers
Eternals shows the structural problem of integrating cosmic-scale mythology with human-scale character drama in a single film. The Celestial material requires the audience to process universe-scale concepts (gestation of cosmic beings, civilizational sacrifice, the indifference of vast intelligences). The Eternals character drama requires the audience to process relationship-scale concepts (love triangles, family conflicts, ideological disagreements). The two scales don’t naturally coexist in the same runtime. Films that attempt to handle both typically succeed at one tone and fail at the other.
The lesson for writers is that cosmic and personal scales require different storytelling approaches and combining them effectively is among the most difficult tasks in genre fiction. The best cosmic stories (2001: A Space Odyssey, Solaris) typically focus on a single character or small group experiencing cosmic-scale revelation. The best ensemble character dramas (Robert Altman’s films, Magnolia) typically work at human scale without cosmic intrusion. Eternals attempts both and accomplishes neither. The Celestial mythology demanded a more contained protagonist focus to land. The character ensemble demanded smaller stakes to develop.
The film’s failure is partly structural instead of executional. Even competent direction would have struggled with this combination. If you’re writing material that combines cosmic and personal scales, consider whether the combination is necessary or whether one of the two tones could carry the work without the other.
The Cast Without Characters
Ten Eternals serve as ensemble leads. The casting is high-profile: Gemma Chan as Sersi, Richard Madden as Ikaris, Salma Hayek as Ajak, Kumail Nanjiani as Kingo, Lia McHugh as Sprite, Brian Tyree Henry as Phastos, Lauren Ridloff as Makkari, Barry Keoghan as Druig, Don Lee as Gilgamesh, and Angelina Jolie as Thena. The diversity of the cast is impressive in terms of representation across ethnicity, gender, disability (Ridloff is deaf and Makkari is the franchise’s first deaf superhero), and sexual orientation (Phastos is the franchise’s first openly gay superhero).
The casting is also one of the film’s central failures. Ten leads across a single film with cosmic-scale mythology can’t receive sufficient character development to register as individuals. The film attempts to give each character their own traits, relationships, and story functions. The runtime can’t support this density. Most characters end the film with the same emotional foundation they had at the start.
The relationships between characters are stated instead of developed. The audience receives the diverse ensemble as decorative presence instead of as functional drama.
The performances themselves are largely competent. The actors are mostly experienced professionals doing what the director asked them to do.
The problem is the material instead of the execution. Salma Hayek as Ajak has approximately fifteen minutes of screen time before the film kills her off, eliminating the character whose presence might have provided the ensemble with structural anchoring. Angelina Jolie as Thena has more screen time but the film gives her a memory-loss condition that prevents her character from developing through clear continuous psychology.
Gemma Chan is the film’s central protagonist, and I don’t blame her for what happens. The writers give Sersi so little range that she can’t carry the dramatic weight the ending puts on her, and by the climax I’m watching a capable actor stand in the middle of a cosmic crisis with nothing to play. Killing off Hayek’s Ajak after fifteen minutes is the worst choice the film makes, because she was the one presence who looked able to hold this crowd together.
The Decorative Diversity Problem
The Eternals marketing prominently emphasized the cast’s diversity across multiple dimensions.
The MCU’s first deaf superhero. The MCU’s first openly gay superhero. The MCU’s first major South Asian lead. The MCU’s first ensemble with serious racial diversity in primary roles. The marketing framing positioned the diversity as a primary reason to engage with the film.
The diversity is real. The film deliberately includes characters from underrepresented populations and treats those characters with dignity. Phastos has a husband and child. Makkari is a fully functional superhero using sign language. The representation isn’t tokenism.
The diversity is also decorative instead of structural in the sense that’s been discussed in the Bring It On review and the Captain Marvel review. Remove the diversity from the cast and the plot would function identically. The characters’ identities don’t generate the story’s events. The story would work mechanically with a different ensemble composition. This is the test that distinguishes structural social content from decorative social content. Eternals fails this test consistently.
The failure produces audience resistance among viewers who can detect the difference between integrated representation and marketing-driven representation.
The Phastos family sequence in which his son shows the joy of human invention is affecting on its own terms but doesn’t generate plot. The Makkari sign-language combat sequences are visually inventive but don’t require deaf representation to function. The decorative diversity earns critical praise from outlets that prioritize representation as primary metric while producing audience disengagement from viewers who came for storytelling. The pattern would compound across later Phase Four entries.
The Two-Hour-Thirty-Seven-Minute Problem
Eternals runs two hours and thirty-seven minutes. The runtime is among the longest in MCU history and isn’t justified by the material being depicted. The first hour establishes the ten Eternals across multiple historical periods through repeated flashback structure. The middle hour follows the reassembly of the scattered team in present day. The final thirty-seven minutes deliver the climactic Celestial confrontation and resolution.
The pacing problems are severe. The flashback structure dilutes audience investment in any single historical period because each scene cuts away before establishing emotional weight.
The reassembly sequences feel mechanically dutiful as the script visits each character in their current setting and recruits them back into the team. The character interactions feel obligatory instead of developed. The audience watches actions occur without receiving the dramatic motivation that would make those actions matter.
A tighter edit at two hours or less would have produced a much better film. Keep the Celestials, keep the strongest character beats, and cut the reassembly tour where the script drops in on each Eternal in turn like a salesman working a neighborhood. I’d have taken the scissors to most of the flashbacks too. Every time one started to build a feeling, the film jumped to another century, and after the third or fourth jump I stopped investing.
For Writers
Eternals shows the cost of runtime expansion without proportionate story development. The film runs over two and a half hours. The story that could have been told fits comfortably in ninety minutes or less. The additional runtime contains repeated flashback structure, dutiful reassembly sequences, and character interaction that doesn’t develop relationships beyond their initial introduction. The audience experiences the extended runtime as drag instead of as depth. The lesson for writers is that runtime should be proportional to actual narrative content instead of to ambition or genre expectation.
If your story requires two hours, write a two-hour story. If your story requires ninety minutes, write a ninety-minute story. Expanding short material into long format produces films that feel slow regardless of the quality of individual sequences. Eternals could have been a considerably better film at a considerably shorter runtime. The expanded runtime didn’t serve the material. It damaged the material. Length isn’t a virtue. Length without content is a fault.
Chloé Zhao’s Direction
Chloé Zhao won the Academy Award for Best Director for Nomadland in 2021, the year before Eternals released. The hiring was widely considered ambitious. Zhao’s previous work had been small-scale independent drama with documentary-influenced visual approach and considerable commitment to landscape photography. The transition to MCU ensemble work was a significant change in scale and genre.
The direction shows specific elements of Zhao’s previous approach. The landscape photography is beautiful in sequences set in remote locations.
The Celestial sequences benefit from her willingness to let visual scale work without overcrowding the frame. The character interaction sequences feel less successful because Zhao’s documentary-influenced approach doesn’t translate effectively to action film conventions or to dialogue-driven ensemble drama.
The result is a film that contains specific Zhao strengths (landscape, scale, contemplative pacing) embedded in genre conventions that her previous work hadn’t prepared her to handle. The marriage of director and material was less successful than Marvel Studios likely anticipated. Zhao’s later career has returned to smaller-scale independent work. That appears to be the better fit for her sensibility.
The Ikaris Betrayal
The third-act twist reveals that Ikaris, the team’s most physically powerful member, has been operating as Arishem’s secret agent throughout the film. Ikaris has known about the Celestial deception and has been working to make sure the emergence proceeds successfully despite the other Eternals’ opposition. The betrayal kills Ajak, kills Gilgamesh, and produces the team’s central conflict for the final act.
The twist is structurally functional but lacks emotional weight.
The character work on Ikaris through the earlier sequences hadn’t established sufficient interior life to make his ideological commitment to the emergence land as character motivation. The audience receives the twist as plot mechanism instead of as character revelation. The eventual decision by Ikaris to fly into the sun after losing the climactic conflict is meant to read as tragic but lands as procedural conclusion to a character whose interior life the film didn’t develop.
Ikaris flying into the sun should hurt, and I felt nothing. That’s on the script. The film never showed me what he believed or why he believed it, so his death plays like a piece being cleared off the board before the credits.
The relationship between Ikaris and Sersi that ostensibly motivates much of the character drama is similarly underdeveloped. The two characters have been in love for thousands of years according to the script.
The film provides no evidence for this beyond stated declarations. The audience doesn’t experience the relationship as established because the establishment was never adequately depicted. The third-act emotional weight that requires the audience to invest in the relationship falls flat because the foundation was never built.
Craft: A Visual Mythology Trapped In A Failed Film
Craft Note
Eternals contains impressive cosmic mythology trapped inside a failed ensemble drama. The Celestial visualizations are among the most ambitious cosmic-scale imagery the MCU has produced. The premise that planets are gestation sites for godlike beings is the kind of high-concept science fiction that mainstream cinema rarely attempts. The visual design of Arishem and the wider Celestial aesthetic draws on Jack Kirby’s Marvel Comics cosmic art with sustained attention to scale and alienness.
As released, the film doesn’t deserve this material. The Celestial mythology exists alongside character drama that works at considerably lower craft level, ensemble pacing that dilutes individual character development, runtime expansion the story can’t justify, and decorative diversity-casting that prioritizes representation marketing over functional storytelling. The combination produces a film in which the worst material buries the best material instead of supporting it.
The lesson for franchise filmmaking is that imaginative material requires complementary craft execution to land effectively. If your premise involves cosmic-scale concepts, the surrounding production needs to support those concepts with comparable craft attention. Eternals had the cosmic-scale premise. Eternals didn’t have the comparable craft attention. The result is wasted potential instead of realized vision. A more disciplined version of this material with tighter ensemble, shorter runtime, and integrated instead of decorative diversity would have produced one of the more interesting MCU films. The version that released is one of the worst.
The Celestials themselves remain potentially valuable franchise material that later MCU productions can build on. The mythology Eternals introduced exists in the franchise even though Eternals didn’t deserve to be the introduction. The film’s failure doesn’t eliminate the conceptual possibility of better Celestial-focused storytelling in future MCU productions. Whether the franchise will recover the potential or abandon it entirely depends on later production decisions. Eternals remains the cautionary example of how cosmic-scale material can be wasted when surrounded by inadequate craft execution.
For the wider analysis of how Phase Four codified the franchise problems Eternals exemplifies, see How The Multiverse Destroyed The MCU. For the structural problem of Infinity Saga consequences that Eternals tries to work alongside, see The Snap, The Blip, And The Catastrophe The MCU Refused To Show.
Should you skip Eternals?
A 1. Eternals is one of the worst major MCU entries and the Phase Four film that most clearly showed the franchise’s loss of editorial discipline. The Celestial sequences and the cosmic mythology are impressive achievements buried inside a failed ensemble drama. The two-and-a-half-hour runtime contains insufficient narrative content to justify the length. The ten-character ensemble can’t develop any individual character to functional dramatic depth. The decorative diversity-casting prioritizes representation marketing over integrated storytelling. The Ikaris betrayal lacks the emotional foundation required to work.
I’ve watched it once and I don’t plan to go back.
If I ever want the Celestials again, I’ll pull up those scenes and skip the rest of the two and a half hours. That’s what the 1 means to me: a handful of images worth seeing, trapped inside a film that squandered a premise Marvel may never get another shot at. It deserved every bit of the criticism it got, and it’s the clearest sign I know that Phase Four had lost the plot.
