r/marvelstudios • u/LopsidedHat9891 • 14h ago
Discussion Years later, I still don't get why Eternals got so much hate.
I was just thinking about Phase 4 and remembered how much everyone trashed Eternals when it dropped. I watched it years ago and actually liked it.
Sure, it was a bit long, but the characters and world-building were cool.
Now that the hype and drama have died down, why do you think people turned on it so hard? Was it just bad timing, or do you think the criticisms actually hold up?
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u/AccordingLog7519 14h ago
Should have been a series. Too much going on . Too little time to convey everything properly.
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u/PineappleNatural7240 13h ago
It's right there. Flip Eternals and Falcon/Winter Soldier.
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u/bren-uh 13h ago
this. exactly this. falcon/winter soldier was very drawn out whereas eternals should've been a series or at least been a two parter movie
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u/OneSufficientFace 13h ago
To further support that, the introduction of Thanos' brother to never see him again is ridiculous. Couldve easily continued the story in a second part with him on board the team
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u/Justice989 13h ago
But the issues with Falcon and Winter Soldier were well-documented. They shoulda left well enough alone and made the original show they wanted to make.
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u/ivebeenhalved 12h ago
What were the issues? I quite liked Falcon and Winter Soldier.
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u/AcesCharles2 12h ago
The original plot was a bioweapon for a mass disease. Didn't go over well during Covid times.
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u/Financial_Accident71 9h ago
Then the next Captain movie involving an Israeli superhero who somehow is the main confidant of the US president and called New World Order was also poorly timed and had to be changed lol Whatever the idea is for the next cap movie, we should all start paying attention to that topic geopolitically
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u/Hikapoo 1h ago
That was always gonna be poorly timed, them even thinking about including a isreali "hero" is already too fucking stupid
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u/BZenMojo Captain America (Cap 2) 7h ago
Then there's Secret Invasion. We saw the Skrulls retconned from holocaust survivors into being somehow both Muslim sleeper cells and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion at the same time while an MI-6 agent tortures everybody and magically gets told the next phase of the plot whenever they run out of ideas, all while cracking jokes as if she's a lovable scamp.
Somebody really thought they were cooking by just making MAGA fanfiction.
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u/Skelito 12h ago
The issue with a lot of these things is that Covid put a wrench into a lot of the production and they had to pivot on a lot of things.
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u/imironman2018 13h ago
This is also the problem with secret invasion. They should’ve done a movie but because they made it a tv series the show had zero budget to make it good. I think eternals had an interesting premise just poor execution. Bad director and didn’t make sense to make it a dramatic artistic movie. It’s a Marvel action movie.
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u/LastRecognition2041 13h ago
She is a great director but a really bad fit for this particular genre. Her quippy interactions and humor were particularly off
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u/Duskdeath 13h ago
The Eternals was the equivalent of Avengers Infinity War, minus all the other movies that helped Infinity War make sense. In retail terms it could be called “sensory overload” too many things to look at the same time makes the experience bad for those who want to enjoy it.
Also “hate” is the wrong term to use for this movie. People HATED Secret Invasion. But Eternals tried to be too many things of too many things WHICH could have made sense if it had been implemented as a tv show. They tried to develop like 10 good guys, 1 race of bad guys, 1 universal being, like 3 or 7 plot points. All in just 1 movie. Funny enough most of the characters were actually decently written. The movie just had way too much going on for it estimated run time. And also they tried to get Black Knight making it 11 heroes in 1 basically unknown movie.
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u/Artistic_Sense3363 9h ago
This 💯💯. There were so many plot points happening I didn’t know which of them to be invested in
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u/BZenMojo Captain America (Cap 2) 7h ago
What's weird about the vibe is, the trailers had the characters make this big joke about how the Eternals see the Avengers as beneath them, which implies that they were doing something more important than the Avengers.
Turns out they were just doing nothing, got bored, and some of them were going to decide to destroy the planet.
This was a movie about sad, bored gods who used to kill some wild animals and teach people pottery. Then they learn in the last fifteen minutes they're genocidal death bots, which begins the actual plot.
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u/taquitosmixtape 14h ago
It’s funny as some things that should have been series, weren’t and some things that should have been movies weren’t. Some decisions over the tv side of marvel have been truly confusing
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u/Choochoo1147 10h ago
Yeah… I’ll miss S2 of Wonder Man but I get why Marvel is shifting away from TV.
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u/Letmepickausername 13h ago
I would've loved one episode per character showing what they're been doing with Ikarus' episode last. At the end of his episode, they could tease his heel turn and lead into the movie.
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u/AdmiralCharleston 13h ago
Absolutely not. I think you need maybe an extra half hour to get rid of some of the bigger pacing issues but making it a series loses the on location shooting and incredible visual effects and I think its far too cinematic for that.
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u/Pyro_liska 13h ago
You would not claim it should have been a series if it got released before Marvel even started to do series. Also you really think the quality would stay the same as series? Eternals fights were absolutely creative and delight to watch.
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u/angellus 11h ago
I still think it should have been a miniseries + a movie. A miniseries for all of the background/historical bits up until Cortez when they kind of split apart and then the movie was everything that happened in modern times.
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u/FluffyWalrusFTW 9h ago
Honestly an anthology around each Eternal culminating in the final fight shown from different perspectives would've been so much fun
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u/everlywinslow 13h ago
100%. introducing 10 new immortals across thousands of years in one 2.5 hour movie was impossible. a 10 episode series would've let the relationships actually breathe
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u/Heart-Shopper 14h ago
The cast was amazing but the film too crowded, you needed a TV show to properly build the characters, or a two part movie. It still is one of the best looking Marvel film.
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u/KelVarnsen_2023 13h ago
A TV show would have been better. But I am not sure you get Salma Hayek and Angelina Jolie to show up for a TV show. Not sure if that would help or hurt it though.
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u/dfassna1 11h ago
They could have just cast other actors. It being Selma Hayek and Angelina Jolie didn’t really do anything for the movie.
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u/HumanDissentipede 12h ago
You’re probably right, but Selma Hayek’s character was actually the worst part of the movie for me.
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u/zmkpr0 13h ago
I think it's a misconception that you need a show to build that many characters properly. Many movies do it easily, you just need to write them well.
Examples like X-Men (the first one managed to introduce everyone just fine), Oceans Eleven, Knives out, The Departed, Snatch (this one has such an interconnected cast, multiple factions and plotlines and it stll works) and many more.
And a TV show would look way worse, because shows have different budgets.
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u/Heart-Shopper 13h ago
Except the story in this one needed a lot of flashbacks, those characters were around for centuries and that’s when a big cast gets in the way. A show would help with pacing and development.
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u/LMBH1234182 11h ago
I never saw it but it seemed like an avengers ensemble type of movie except I don’t know who any of the characters are beforehand.
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u/xyzsomething 14h ago
I didn’t hate it but I also just didn’t enjoy it, the problem with the MCU and everything being connected is that you start seeing movies as episodes of a much larger story, this one felt unnecessary and pointless, leaving more questions than answers.
It wasn’t a bad movie, just a bit meh
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u/Single-Purpose-7608 13h ago
Leaving more questions than answers isnt a bad thing, as long as those questions get answered.
The problem is Eternals might be a loose end that never gets tied up
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u/altoona_sprock 12h ago
once Doomsday/Secret Wars establishes a new unified timeline nothing from Eternals will ever be mentioned again.
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u/Naakturne 6h ago
Questions like “Why do some Eternals have British or Mexican accents thousands of years before those civilizations existed?”
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u/ThatEvanFowler Thanos 12h ago
It's not bad. There's a lot of beautiful filmmaking and some fascinating world-building for the MCU, but it just tried to do too much at once and asked the audience to buy-in to too many premises simultaneously.
A team that comes off as so close to the Justice League that it almost seems like a parody.
Thousands of years of backstory pressed into a single film.
A forced romance between leads without chemistry.
Repeated, extended exposition dumps that alienated general audiences.
Reveals that somewhat reduce the characters to robots without much agency for large portions of the story.
Reveals that attempt to bring depth and dimensionality to a villain that is replaced by ally betrayal halfway through.
Setups for other projects that only tangentially connect to the story currently being told and have no particular payoff.
Cameos and references that the vast majority of the general audience either aren't familiar with or that are delivered so vaguely as to nullify their surprise.
One of the world's most famous actresses pressed into a very reduced role that doesn't give her much to work with.
Pacing issues.
Mythology referenced without being explained for audiences that aren't already familiar with their historical significance.
A grim tone and pensive energy to much of the film.
And so on.
I liked it better than most, but even I haven't found the desire to revisit it nearly as much as the MCU films that I like best. Or even those that I only kind of like. It's just a lot. And it's not the most fun film to watch. It has it's moments that are quite charming, but they are a little fewer and further between that a lot of the other movies.
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u/Jackal_6 The Mandarin 13h ago
Eternals didn't get hate; it got indifference
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u/VirginiaFox6 11h ago
This. I never saw it and have never really found a reason to.
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u/Alkohal 10h ago
Its not the worst marvel movie but it certainly is the most "none of this matters" marvel movie.
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u/Chimpbot Ronan the Accuser 10h ago
For me, it's the worst because it took a concept that should have been thrilling and engaging, and somehow turned it into one of the most dull movies I've ever sat through. The second Black Panther movie also suffered from this; it was a three-hour funeral dirge.
I can forgive a good number of things when it comes to movies, but being dull and/or boring is never one of them.
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u/dudeman4297 8h ago
One might say... they forgot that it existed?
It isn't love, it isn't hate, it's just indifference.
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u/AmbitiousTwo22222 13h ago
It represents the peak of the MCU's success spawning mediocre long run time films focused more on spectacle than substance, without moving the meta-stories of the MCU forward. It's like the most inconsequential MCU movie I can think of.
I think Angelina Jolie and Kumail Nanjiani's characters are interesting enough to make nice little cameos in future movies, but the rest of the cast was pretty boring.
Until I looked at the Wiki, I forgot Kit Harrington was in the movie, so hopefully we see his Black Knight at some point.
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u/henryp_dev 4h ago
They are trying too hard to make everything connected to the point that it’s kinda obvious what they are trying to connect to. Infinity saga was interesting because there was mystery, we were “clueless” until that “ohhh now it makes sense”. Seems that they are doing to keep people hooked but they are losing the “magic” of the mystery.
I dont read comics so to me it was just interesting little details until later on that I was like “oh shit wait…”. Now it’s very obvious that every movie is like a next episode in the series.
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u/KelVarnsen_2023 14h ago
It was really long and kind of boring. Plus in the 5:years since it came out there hasn't been any follow up with any of the characters. So anyone who was kind of meh on the movie or maybe liked it a little might be annoyed by that and sort of retroactively disliked it.
Plus they released 4 MCU movie in 2021? No Way Home was great and Black Widow and Shang Chi were really good. 4 is a lot of movies for people to keep up with, which would annoy some people so I can easily see some of that frustration being directed at the worst movie of the 4 that came out that year.
Plus it came out in the middle of the pandemic.
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u/WarzonePacketLoss 10h ago
Black Widow was really good
Pump the brakes, brochacho.
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u/KelVarnsen_2023 10h ago
I said really good, not great which I think is a fair assessment. Just introducing Florence Pugh as Yelena would have been enough to get to good.
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u/Joinedforthis1 10h ago
Black Widow was great. It was entertaining and emotional
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u/ciao_fiv 11h ago
only movie i have ever fallen asleep in the theater during. it was incredibly boring lol
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u/teachmebasics 8h ago
Black widow was not really good lol. Mid at best. 6/10 max.
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u/plaid-tuxido506 11h ago
I paused Eternals on D+ to go see Spiderman NWH because it wasn't keeping my interest. Ended up being just me and 2 others in the theater which was an amazing experience.
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u/HeroXeroV 14h ago
The plot was boring and there were too many characters by far.
The villain ultimately wasn't very interesting.
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u/Nathan_McHallam 6h ago
Seriously I constantly see takes that "Eternals wasn't that bad" but I never see anyone say anything beyond that. There's no one begging for the grand return of Sersi. I don't believe there's any diehard fans of Thena or Phastos or Druig. Kingo is enjoyable but purely because of Kumail Nanjiani's natural charisma. No one's eagerly waiting for Kit Harington to show up in Secret Wars as Dane Whitman, or if Harry Styles will ever continue his story as Eros. It was a bad, boring movie without a single enjoyable character.
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u/SentinelATL 14h ago
Could have been a 5 episode miniseries. The cast and visuals were wonderful though. Idk it just didn’t connect with tons of people.
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u/Moon_Beans1 13h ago
I think a key flaw in DC and Marvel's planning is that they keep making expensive projects out of characters and groups who have struggled to maintain even a comic book title - Inhumans, Supergirl and The Eternals.
People will point to the unexpected success of GOTG but the Guardians have had multiple long comic runs so even though they didn't have any pop culture presence they had proven themselves able to carry a comic for double figure runs.
The Eternals are interesting, have rich lore and have stories full of interesting concepts but they've always struggled to maintain an ongoing title and so their inability to support a movie should be surprising. Perhaps like in the comics the Eternals should have been in a Thor or GOTG movie so that someone else's popularity could have done the heavy lifting.
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u/ChronoMonkeyX Darcy 14h ago
Too many characters that never had a chance to develop into anyone we cared about. Some just disappear because there's no room for them, then all of them disappeared forever.
The entire point of the shared universe is the interconnectedness, while Eternals might as well be a DC movie for all the impact it has on the MCU. It also looked like a DC movie, which is a real problem.
If it was a series, it could have been good.
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u/Lolzycannon Tony Stark 13h ago
I can give you one reason right off the top of my head. Almost no likeable characters.
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u/SnooTangerines7026 14h ago
No clear heroes that people cared about.
No clear villain at all.
Harry Styles
Anything else?
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u/Shuuraa 13h ago
Harry Styles appeared like 4 seconds at the very end. He is not part of the movie and has nothing to do if the movie is good or bad in itself.
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u/TheBasicGuy14 14h ago
True.
Thanos almost destroys the planet and these gods are just chilling until then, and suddenly they wake up and start fighting?
Poor script apart from few good scenes.
No connection with any major mainstream character.
And then, the sequel gets dumped. No whereabouts now...
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u/TurnoverAdditional65 10h ago
Oh man, Harry Styles. I don’t personally know anything about him except he sings, but wouldn’t be able to pick him out of a lineup. But when the at post-credit scene aired and he showed up, this girl sitting about 4 seats down from my friend and I exclaimed, very loudly, “Harry Styles?? What the fuck????”
It’s still a joke we make at every single Marvel movie we go watch, to this day.
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u/ChronoMonkeyX Darcy 14h ago
DC color desaturation. It looked like a DC movie, and those suck. Also the cg monsters looked like DC, soulless.
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u/JaeTheOne 10h ago
Harry Styles wasnt in the movie, he was in the post credit scene which im sure many people didnt even see
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u/anonymousgoose64 Captain America 14h ago
It's actually my favorite MCU film because of the visuals and it's one of the only movies ever that really showcases how fast speedsters actually are
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u/BackgroundEngineer11 13h ago
I didn't dislike it the first time I watched it, but was bored. Second time was while I watching all the MCU back to back and the lack of charisma from most of the characters stood out.
The dinner scene where most of the characters are seeing each other for the first time in centuries was so wooden it felt like it was the first thing they filmed and the actors were just saying their lines.
Recently people were praising how Makkari looked doing super speed. Honestly, I couldn't see how it was any better than other movies and can barely remember any of the fight scenes.
I don't care for Harry Styles but Eros injected a huge amount of charisma right at the end and it made me actually interested in a sequel. It's a shame the movie has been mostly abandoned by the MCU for years because there was a lot of potential.
It needed better writing and a better director. So much of phase 4 was trying new things and getting new blood into the development. Eternals and Black Widow were definite misses in that regard.
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u/NurtureBoyRocFair 13h ago
It’s just not that great. I’ve never seen so little romantic chemistry between two leads before.
The lore was cool but it just wasn’t that great of a film.
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u/stardust1914 13h ago
I've only watched it once but I did like it. It was also cool to see Kumail Ali Nanjiani in a marvel movie as I knew him from Silicon Valley lol.
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u/Thick-competition2-0 12h ago
Honestly at first I didnt understand it. I watched it again recently and its a beautiful story, I just dont understand why or how it relates to the MCU Timeline. And I think the timing of the release is what confuses me. It came out after Endgame, during a period of time when Marvel/Disney were releasing alot of side shows that had some form of direct connection to the MCU Timeline. Black Widow: Natasha’s story. Shang-Chi: The 10 Rings Organization. Spider No Way Home: Tom Hollands Spiderman story. Venom is Sony so Im not speaking on that. But when Eternals was rolled out (maybe it was just me honestly it probably is just me 😂) it came across as a movie that would explain something with endgame or infinity wars or maybe it has something to do with Thor? I dont know. But i went into watching it the second time, thinking of it as a MCU movie thag doesnt have much to do with the MCU Timeline, thinking of it as a prequel to EVERYTHING and it was a good film. Kinda long, not enough character development, but still good watch
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u/Upper-Major8854 Tony Stark 14h ago
Because it was not great. It was okay, and okay is not enough for like the 30th movie in a franchise.
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u/eltrotter Black Panther 14h ago
In the long run, I think people will ultimately see it as an honourable but failed experiment.
Chloe Zhao was a really unexpected choice for an MCU director, and her previous film Nomadland is a truly incredible piece of filmmaking but also just about as far away from an MCU film as you could reasonably get. There was clearly a concerted effort to shake up the tone of the MCU and strive for a more prestige, "grown up" style.
The problem is that the precise strength of a film like Nomadland - a tender, confronting, honest character study of the internal conflict between human warmth and bare-toothed survival instinct - doesn't translate at all to a film which has an entire chorus of main characters. I genuinely believe that the "chorus" thing was literal and intentional... I think the idea was to evoke the idea of a Greek chorus where each Eternal represents one perspective and trait and the protagonist of the film is "The Eternals" as a group, but whether intended or not, it didn't really work.
The film does get credit for having some genuinely well-shot and well-directed action, and all of the actors do seem to genuinely be trying their best with what they have. I would love them to get another chance, it is a shame we've just never seen them again.
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u/Goatedbattler1 14h ago
Me too, thought it was an okay movie introduced some interesting new characters with high potential. But people just decided its not worth it
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u/ConstantRefills 13h ago edited 13h ago
Dull plot, boring characters, bland performances, generic villain, poorly paced, makes no sense in larger MCU logic, tonally all over the place.
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u/Eastern_Clerk165 14h ago
What characters? This move didn't have characters. It's a bunch of people that we don't know at the beginning and still don't know at the end...
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u/Extra_Age2505 14h ago
I watched Eternals for first time recently and I found it a bit dull. I don’t expect or want non-stop action in the films I watch but the story was just not very engaging and the characters weren’t very compelling either. There wasn’t a lot of character work for most of the Eternals, they’re fleshed out but there aren’t exactly many developed character arcs going on
And I don’t think much of its worldbuilding, the Celestials being the ones who create stars, planets and life raise a lot of questions. We have a decent grasp on how stars and planets form, and theories on how life originated. But I guess that’s not the case in the MCU. Stars and planets don’t form when matter is gravitationally attracted towards a larger mass? Does that not contradict the laws of physics we assume to be true in the MCU? If gravity exists in-universe, why wouldn’t it be responsible for how planets and stars form? Or is it? Does it create stars and planets in addition to the Celestials doing it too? I don’t think that what Eternals says about what the Celestials do is a good addition to the franchise
It’s not a terrible film, it’s not even in the bottom five but I think there are problems there
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u/dekomorii Bucky 14h ago
I think half of the movie was trying to assemble the members, the idea itself was really noble and i liked it i think people are just trashing it too much
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u/Tonks_55 14h ago
Just rewatched this yesterday, and my thought was that there was too much going on in one movie. You can’t have a cast of 10 and give them each their own time and not end up with a multi hour saga. It either should’ve been multiple movies or a miniseries. It was really interesting. It just was I think too much for the Marvel cinematic universe to be what it was rather than what it could or should have been.
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u/Marius_Sulla_Pompey 13h ago
Omg I haven’t seen it for years. What a load of rubbish. One of the rare occasions that I left the cinema halfway through.
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u/theramboapocalypse 13h ago
Nobody turned on it, it got hate from the get go. It was not a great movie, and the best part was black knight and blade at the end
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u/searcher4421 13h ago
Every if the movie wasn’t great, I thought it was okay as far as story goes, I don’t think they should have abandoned the characters altogether.
A few of them could have had some sort of purpose in any other MCU movie, especially if they’re written better than they were in the previous movie.
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u/RangryRanga 13h ago
Whilst it had issues, it was also at the time where everyone was subconsciously comparing everything to infinity war and endgame..
So most projects that came out weren’t greeted with any love
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u/blinkyretard 13h ago
In hindsight, its commercial performance seems top tier if we look at MCU performance after endgame. I wonder how much would it have earned if it got released in 2025? Might be second mcu bomb after The Marvels.
I liked it a lot though.
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u/blinkyretard 13h ago
I now hope that they may return in X-Men and Celestials judgement thread maybe handled with Apocalypse. Fingers crossed.
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u/WannaHitHim 12h ago
A little bit of bad pacing. A little bit of aimlessness after Thanos. A little bit racism. A little bit of misogyny.
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u/acekobb 12h ago
Visuals were great. Actors were great. 2 reasons why it was not good.
1). Eternals are a C or D tier group of characters. Not much strong IP bringing people to the theater so it was going to need word of mouth.
2). They are indestructible synthetic beings or whatever the hell. Watching non human things collide like a little kid with toys mashed together in an over the top way got so stale at the end of the movie. It became pointless CGI.
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u/Better-Pop-3932 12h ago
I thought Eternals was more fun than the Fantastic Four and The Thunderbolts.
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u/GroundbreakingTax259 12h ago
While it had its flaws, I don't think it deserved all the "Marvel's First FLOP" headlines it got. It was still overall at least interesting, entertaining, and looked gorgeous (with some of the best depictions of superpowers in media), all of which can't be said for the likes of Thor: The Dark World or "Iron Fist," or honestly even Black Widow. I also think it was released at the wrong time. Being the third of four movies released in a 5-month period during the second pandemic year was asking a lot of audiences, especially coming before Spider-Man: No Way Home.
I have a little conspiracy theory that the critic class (read "snobs") took it upon themselves to "save" their darling director from working with Marvel again because they don't consider it to be "proper cinema" beyond throwing an occasional award nomination to somsthing like Black Panther in order to keep themselves relevant to the culture. They took offense to Marvel trying to be serious with Eternals, and were going to slap it down no matter what.
I'm still a little salty we'll never get any follow-up and Marvel seems content to never ask big philosophical questions about immortality and trying to please a god that clearly doesn't care about you again. I'd hoped maybe we'd get to see Kingo in season 2 of "Wonder Man" (which I also really enjoyed), but now that project isn't happening either. At least the X-Men seem to be finally getting a decent adaptation, so I'll take what I can get.
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u/Ok_Grape8942 12h ago
This movie was too random to come out after Endgame and also created plot holes in the MCU. Also too many unknown characters in the mix. Sure you could argue with Guardians of The Galaxy having that same type of layout but this one did too much and also had no business being a thing after endgame. This movie also had the end of the world type stakes which is bad since Endgame was literally all about saving the world and the universe. I would say the most logical movie would have been a Nova movie instead of the Eternals. To deal with the aftermath of the destruction of Xandar.
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u/wheenus 12h ago
Everyone is going to nit pick and claim it should have been this or that
Ultimately the main issue, as with most modern media.
It wasn't white male led, it was an unconventional story, and tried to be different.
Until people can just sit and go, that wasn't for me but it was ok for what it was, we will never get anything different and it'll all be formulaic.
Instead it's hate and vitriol because they can online.
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u/ScaredFamousfan 12h ago
Loved it, it made over 400 million at the box office on par with Shang Chi during the pandemic before anyone got a booster shot to see No Way Home. I love it till this day and hope these characters and Chloe return to marvel when they’re allowed to experiment again
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u/artistbutcher 6h ago
i always loved eternal it was first time for long I saw them going on serious stories and good movie with great visuals . there might be some flaws but it comes at top to me in many ways
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u/askanaccountant 6h ago
They did Kumail Namanji (spelling who knows to lazy to google it) so bad in that movie. "Yo hes cool, fun, interesting, lets have him nope out for the climax"....like wtf....he was the comedic relief.
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u/Ashen_Larry 14h ago
I was really interested in this when it was announced because it was characters I knew nothing about and has a stacked cast. But it was just boring and forgettable. I can't even tell you what happened in it. And until this poster I forgot it had Angelina Jolie and Salma Hayek in it.
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u/canonbite 13h ago
Because it's meandering and boring and the characters are shallow and the villain is unengaging and the plot is unremarkable.
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u/hisae1421 13h ago
Cause it was cringe af really shite movie. Scénario is dumb actors are bad and CGI sucks
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u/Important-Row8209 10h ago
Personally for me, if you start doing unrealistic superpowers and the stakes gets bigger and bigger, it gets harder and harder for the audience to connect or relate to the characters.
That's why ironman worked, and spiderman and batman always works. Even captain america worked, it helps to not show too much superpowers, mostly relying on acrobatic stunts. Superman, being super op, most of the time doesn't work until he gets depowered at some point in the story and see how he fares without the powers.
That's what I personally feel at least. I honestly was not a fan of the old xmen films because of this. Like everyone mostly just got powers and blasting each other at some point. Logan was good...yeah because there are not much super op powers firing off the screen everywhere.
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u/fenoard Daniel Sousa 9h ago edited 9h ago
tbh, chloé zhao herself created the characters to be as human as possible, even though they're super advanced robots, they also have many weakness that human have, like fear, jealousy, narcissism, selfish, broken souls, apathy, betrayal, etc.
but the entire concept of the movie itself glosses over everything, makes it hard to grasp what's going on and it ends up going over people's head. it has too many characters, many plots to follow and keep jumping between timelines and locations, it's too much.
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u/Ill_Painting_6919 6h ago
In a nutshell, not only too many characters, too many plot threads, and the timeline hopping, but also these were characters a lot of people never even heard of.
This should have been done as a series, to introduce characters along the way, spend episodes on backgrounds, and then hit the metaplot crescendo with a movie.
In the end, it is a serviceable movie for those who know the characters (still not great), but it's a whole lot of "wtf is happening?" and "why should I care?" moments that the casual fan just left the theater more confused than they went in.
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u/FilthyCasual2k17 5h ago
This would have worked better if it was a mini series. Maybe 6 episodes 45 minutes each. Throw in some character building, nothing expensive cgi wise, just let them talk and comment, connect and breathe.
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u/bewilderscript 14h ago
Eternals has some gorgeous visuals and really interesting lore, but it's such an odd duck of a film. The main character just isn't that compelling and is the least interesting person in any given scene (when Ikarus isn't there); the whole "oh yeah we've been here the whole time but you never heard of us before is because ummm anyway" angle didn't work when Marvel films have been so interconnected in the past; and its runtime is simultaneously too long and not long enough to convey everything it wants to get across.
It should have been a miniseries and someone else should have been the protagonist. Maybe Ikarus, so the Obvious Betrayal was a little less obvious?