Unlock the Ultimate MCU Power Ranking: Which Marvel Movie Truly Packs a Knockout Punch?
Look. Eternals is not a poorly made movie. Let’s eliminate that notion right away. It’s directed by Chloé Zhao, the reigning Oscar winner for Best Director for her efforts on last year’s Nomadland. This was never going to be a bad movie.
That said, it’s also hard to call Eternals a particularly good movie either; it’s got a gorgeous color palette and stellar special effects, but the movie is 2 hours and 37 minutes long, and really feels like it. It takes a big swing—Zhao clearly wanted to make a potential best movie in the MCU, rather than something like Black Widow which rarely feels like it wants to be anything more than Winter Soldier-lite. It’s unfortunate, in turn, that it just doesn’t often work. It’s a struggle to develop 10+ new characters all at once, and the movie’s commitment to going back and forth between the present and flashbacks of the Eternals’ history is confusing and, at times, frustrating as a viewer. We just want to see what’s happening next!
There’s some good here; Kumail Nanjiani is charismatic and funny as Kingo, an Eternal posing as a Bollywood movie star. Brian Tyree Henry is great as Phastos, the team’s inventor and the first canonically gay Marvel superhero, and Lauren Ridloff and Barry Keoghan play really well off each other as Eternals Makkari (the MCU’s first deaf superhero) and Druig. Kit Harington makes his own MCU debut as Dane Whitman, a character only briefly in the film but that we want to see much more from. Harington has always been charismatic, and this seems to be a role that will really highlight that down the line.
Eternals also has a stellar pair of credits scenes that go a long way to setting up whatever it is that’s coming next in this cosmic lane of the MCU; in the end, though, it’s a film that makes us more eager to see what’s coming next than to ever really revisit again.
MCU understanding needed? As long as you have some general idea of the Marvel universe, you’d actually be pretty good going into this one cold. There are some references to Thanos and the events of Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame, but all things considered, as with most MCU first chapters, it’s a fairly self-contained story.
33. Thor: Love and Thunder (2022)
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