SPOILERS AHEAD: It was inevitable an MCU release would not score widely with critics. That it hadn’t happened sooner is actually surprising. Critics have gotten a smile or two from the established characters’ antics over the past 13 years, and the less-known Guardians of the Galaxy was deftly crafted and felt fresh and light.
In 2021, we finally got Cloe Zhao’s The Eternals, an ambitious, sprawling visual epic revealing many secrets related to the MCU that, quite frankly, many of us did not see coming. And many critics weren’t having it.
The opening crawl leads the audience to believe that a group of huge, infinitely-powerful beings known as the Celestials sent Eternals (from the planet Olympia) to Earth on a mission to destroy monsters from deep space called the Deviants from preying on the humans, allowing them to survive and advance their various cultures around the planet.
However…this is fake news on the grandest scale.
To summarize the story, a group of huge, infinitely-powerful beings known as the Celestials have maintained a cycle of galactic birth and destruction in order to expand life within the universe. Planets with bio-energy become “eggs” for new Celestials, and every million years a new one emerges from the planetary core to continue building new galaxies.
Guess which “egg” is next? Earth, now that it has reached adequate global population, is housing the Celestial Tiamut.
Deviants were actually created by the Celestials to knock off apex predators on Earth, and when the creatures mutated out of control, the Eternals (also created by the Celestials) were sent to wipe out the Deviants.
The Eternals are not aware of their true origin or that everyone on Earth is going to die when the Celestial emerges because they get their memories wiped each time the Celestial birth cycle ends, and their memories are stored aboard a giant spaceship called the World-Forge.
Having their memories wiped each time a world is destroyed allows them to psychologically and emotionally cope with starting the process over and over again, although a memory leak starts happening to Thena (Angelina Jolie) which causes her to go into a blind rage and attack anyone near her.
When the Eternals learn the truth, the group fractures over following Arishem’s orders or saving Earth by stopping Tiamut’s birth. Some Deviants pop up, but they are just a plot device to kill off some characters and are not developed in the same way they are in the comic book lore.
The movie climaxes in a big visual sci-fi/fantasy sequence where the surviving Eternals fight amongst themselves as Tiamut begins to emerge and the world’s destruction is at hand. Will they get on the same page long enough to save the whole world? Well, yes they do, but it ain’t too easy.
There are missing pieces to this puzzle, maybe there are lies on top of lies going on. The plot raised a number of questions:
- Thanos is revealed in Avengers: Infinity War to have named parents and we meet his half-brother in a post-credit scene. But we learn, according to Arishem, Eternals are synthetic beings, so no sexual reproduction process.
- The Eternals resemble human beings on Earth exactly. What do the Celestials do when the humanoid population of another world doesn’t look like Earth humans? Are the Eternals assigned to that planet made to match that planet’s inhabitants? A peek inside the World-Forge with Circe (Gemma Chan) doesn’t say one way or another but the synthezoids-in-waiting do look very Earth-human.
- Why give the Eternals feelings in the first place? Arishem would have been better served by emotionless soldiers just following orders without question.
- Does Tiamut contribute to his own undoing at the end of the movie? Are the Celestials themselves not all on the same page about this catastrophic cycle of birth-death-rebirth?
Overall, the core of this movie is a classic secular versus sacred conflict. What happens when His creations challenge God? The question left at the end by the victors remained hanging: “Did we do the right thing?”
This easily could have been ridiculous but Zhao finds just the right tone to guide the viewer through. Solid soundtrack and score, and some humorous moments sprinkled in definitely help.
