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This film favors the eternal MCU- ETERNALS

Eternals competes well with the best Marvel adventures and may have more serious questions than ever.

Eternals

“We're Eternals. We came here seven thousand years ago, to protect humans from the Deviants.” Sirsi (Gemma Chan)

Just when I thought there were no more super-hero trope twists, no fabulous plots to raise my eyebrows, Marvel Studios gives them freshness in Eternals, which is replete with formula variations and attractive characters. Not only can’t these heroes die, or so it seems, they are unable to protect the humans they have grown to love. After hiding amongst us for 7000 years, eternals emerge to do the bidding of Celestials and their leader, Arishem (David Kaye voice), to squash the Deviants (would someone please come up with variations on lizards and dinosaurs?), who are planning to destroy humans.

Besides our heroes’ impotence in saving mankind, they have grown accustomed to our imperfections, in fact may envy them. Even when they show Hiroshima or Babylon or Nazis, the eternals still are fascinated by our contradictory natures, wherein our weaknesses and crimes are accepted as enviable parts of our fascinating makeup.

Give it to the director, Chloe Zhao, who also helmed Nomadland, to cast naturalism over the proceedings, where men and women really fall in love and some heroes go to the side of the bad guys for reasons not entirely reasonable but very human, like fear, custom, or greed.

Some of the good guys like Sirsi and Ikaris (Richard Madden) get torn between allegiances and loves, just the way we humans do. Besides those lead heroes, the supporting eternals cast is rife with imperfections and affections, as human as could ever be expected from eternals, who can become mortal, as we find out.

While similarities to Guardians of the Galaxy banter and Dune gravitas are apparent, the complex human inconsistencies in the eternals, unbeknownst to them, set them off from almost all other MCU heroes. At north of 2 ½ hours, Eternals is so deftly entertaining that the viewing is as entertaining at each time period (Tenochtitlan massacre, Hiroshima, for example) as a National Geographic documentary and as challenging as a TED talk.

The existential questions of who the eternals want to be and what they are willing to do to save Earth give a significance rarely found in the MCU. Concerns for the environment and climate as well as overpopulation lie underneath without being sermons. Nice.

Eternals can be enjoyed for its visual artistry and character vibrancy. In other words, it’s a pleasant sensual and intellectual experience for most of us earthlings, who are happily not ageless.

Eternals

Director: Chloe Zhao (Nomadland)

Screenplay: Zhao et al.

Cast: Gemma Chan (Crazy Rich Asians), Richard Madden (Rocketman)

Run Time: 2h 37m

Rating: PG-13

John DeSando, a Los Angeles Press Club first-place winner for National Entertainment Journalism, hosts WCBE’s It’s Movie Time and co-hosts Cinema Classics. Contact him at JohnDeSando62@gmail.com

John DeSando holds a BA from Georgetown University and a Ph.D. in English from The University of Arizona. He served several universities as a professor, dean, and academic vice president. He has been producing and broadcasting as a film critic on It’s Movie Time and Cinema Classics for more than two decades. DeSando received the Los Angeles Press Club's first-place honors for national entertainment journalism.