Random Movie Reviews, Volume 16

The Eternals & Modern Hollywood (A Rant) 

The Eternals (2021): If a corporate Human Resources department ever made a big-budget superhero movie, this would be the result. It’s as if such minor things as creativity and storytelling took a backseat to checking off diversity and inclusion boxes; there’s so much “representation” in this film as to be ludicrous. And you shouldn’t be surprised to learn that this rampant diversity causes many, many issues with the movie, chief among them that there’s absolutely no unity among the titular Eternals, who seem like what they are: a bunch of actors from various racial backgrounds who have been thrown together by SJW Hollywood producers. There is zero connection between this execrable film and the original Jack Kirby comics…well, Angelina Jolie’s body does conform to a Kirby-esque mold, but we're not supposed to notice things like that. Comics have been entirely de-sexualized by Hollywood, unless of course we’re talking about the male characters, who per the norm get more naked than the women do…I mean we must always subvert the male gaze while appeasing the male gays. That’s pretty much as important to modern Hollywood as the diversity and inclusion. 

The film is a 2 and a half hour slog that does a piss-poor job of introducing an unwieldy cast of characters. I mean there are like 10 or 12 “main characters” in the film, meaning that they are all reduced to ciphers for the most part. However the only name you will remember is Sersi, as her name is repeated about a million times in the film. Surely this is intentional, given that Sersi is played by a Chinese woman (one who is apparently incapable of changing her expression…seriously one of the most wooden performances I’ve witnessed in a modern film), and The Eternals is directed by…you guessed it, a Chinese woman. Sure, Sersi was a statuesque brunette in the Kirby comics, but forget about that. So if literally every character says “Sersi” about twenty times each in the film, then surely that is only a good thing. We need to be reminded of her female empowerment at all times! How else would we know she’s so important? I mean are we to expect the plot to let us know, through organic storytelling elements? No, we don’t have time for a plot – we have an agenda to push! 

Now I harp on the diversity because it is the ultimate undoing of The Eternals, yet of course it is central to the objectives of the ideologues who made the film in the first place. The Eternals, we learn, have been together for untold eons, and one of the many, many half-assed subplots (half-assed because they’re rarely elaborated upon) is that they are a “family.” And yet in a real family – that is, not the leftist modern concept of a family, where your best friends and neighbors and pet dog are your “family,” but a real actual nuclear family – there is of course diversity…yet there is also unity. There is no unity among these Eternals. I mean Sersi and top tough guy Ikaris are supposed to be in love, with the filmmakers striving to create this epic, millennia-spanning love story between the two, yet the actors have zero chemistry, and the romance is forced. That said, I kinda appreciated how Sersi clearly digs white guys; there’s only one white non-Eternal male in the movie, and Sersi’s dating him, too. I’m surprised someone didn’t catch that in the preproduction stage and revise the character to be a person of color. 

There are only two white guys among the Eternals, and of course one of them turns out to be the villain. Because of course; who else would you expect to be the villain in an overly-“diverse” cast? Did you think it would be the deaf black girl? And speaking of which, yes, there is a deaf girl among the Eternals, but if you think about it, even that is stupid. Because another of the Eternals is a genius capable of inventing advanced technology…and of course he’s a heavyset black guy who is gay (and who takes part in “the first gay kiss in the Marvel Cinematic Universe,” because that’s what we go to superhero movies to see, right?)…and yet somehow, despite existing for eons and eons and eons, this super-genius never considers creating a gizmo that would allow the deaf girl to hear and speak. I mean just give him another couple million years, folks! These things take time! 

And speaking of, uh, speaking, this brings me to another issue of stupidity: all the accents. So the setup is that the Eternals have existed together as a unit for millions of years, and have been on Earth since the beginnings of history. You’d think, after all that time, that Salma Hayek’s Ajak might’ve, you know, lost her Mexican accent. Same goes for the Asian Eternals, the Indian Eternal, etc. Even the few white Eternals have accents (with Angelina Jolie’s being humorously fake). I mean don’t you think they’d all have acquired accent-neutral speeking styes after, I don’t know, a couple hundred years or so? But then, Ajak already has a Mexcan accent when the Eternals arrive in the prehistoric era, before Mexican accents even existed, same as the others already have their accents, so I realize I’m splitting hairs. Actually I’m thoroughly splitting hairs, as everyone is speaking English, which itself didn't exist yet...but then if you think about it, it’s still ridiculous, because why would the Eternals each have a different accent if they were all created by the same Celestial?  This is another mystery the movie doesn’t bother to solve, let alone acknowledge, because it goes without saying that there is absolutely no ethnicity-derived humor in the film…modern Hollywood couldn’t even conceive of such a thing, anyway. But just imagine the fun someone like Mel Brooks could’ve had with this belabored “diversity” setup in a 1970s film…you know, back when Hollywood wasn’t straightjacketed by woke ideology.   

Man, I haven’t even gotten into the plot, but I don’t want to waste too much time on that. It’s sort of like if Lost had been condensed into a movie, with constant and seemingly arbitrary flashbacks to various events in the past, as we learn how the Eternals came to Earth in the prehistoric era and have stayed here all these centuries to fight the Deviants. All at the behest of their creator, a massive being known as a Celestial. (The Celestials are the only thing in the movie that actually resemble their Jack Kirby origins…and unsuprisingly so, given that they are CGI creations and thus couldn’t be “diversified.”) The Deviants are one of the countless stupid things in The Eternals, literally only showing up when the movie needs an action scene and then disappearing. But they’re just these demonic four-legged creatures, boring CGI monsters that bring to mind the similarly-boring CGI monsters of Justice League and The Avengers. One of them, apropos of nothing, morphs into a human-like appearance and makes random grandiose speeches which ultimately have zilch to do with anything. 

Oh, and the action scenes – they suck, too. They’re just chaotic sprawls of pixels as the various CGI creations face off against one another, with the actors occasionally striking lame “heroic” poses. And for that matter the filmmakers never can figure out the powers of the various Eternals, nor how they rank against one another. We’re told Angelina Jolie’s Thera is “the greatest warrior,” yet Ikaris (I’m too disinterested to look up the actor’s name) is most often described as the most powerful of the group. Huh? But then their powers seem to depend upon the lazy plotting; Ajak fights as good as the others in the flashback scenes before apparently forgetting how to use her powers in a sequence in the modern era. Oh, and that reminds me of another stupid part…so they have all these title cards, like “Mesopotamian Period” or whatnot, to let us know when the various flashbacks occur. Then, late in the movie, we get a title card informing us, “Five days ago.” Five days ago from when? The prehistoric era sequence? The part in 400 AD India? It was just so stupid and poorly thought out that it made me laugh…but then the stupid goofs, of which there were many, were all that did make me laugh. 

Another stupid thing is that, despite being ageless, these Eternals seem to have no appreciation of time. How would it feel to live for millennia, to see humans grow old and die? Hell if I know after watching this movie. You’d think that would be a chief concern for the story to convey, but nope. As hard as it is to believe, The Highlander actually did a better job of this. One of the Eternals even has a human spouse and a child…is this his first human family in the thousands of years he’s been here on Earth? Has he had other families who grew old and died as he remained ageless? How does he connect with his young son, knowing that he will outlive him? You will not find an answer to any of these questions in The Eternals. No, the bigger concern is the ideology – because, you see, the Eternal with a human family is the gay Eternal, who you betcha has a son he’s raising with his husband. What matter such trivialities as character development when you have an agenda to push? The guy even gives an impassioned speech about “never wanting to change a single thing” about himself. Even when the world is about to end, it comes down to identity politics.

There’s so much dumb shit in this movie I could write a book about it. I mean at the end – and there are no spoilers here, but at the same time who gives a shit about this stupid movie – the godlike Celestial who created the Eternals millions of years ago pops up and snatches a few of them off the Earth to give them a good talking to. Meanwhile, a few of the other Eternals have recently left the Earth to find more of their own kind. Yet the ones who left Earth are’t collected here by the Celestial in the climax. What, this godlike, omniscient and omnipotent being couldn’t find them? I mean all you have to do is hop on a spaceship and you can totally evade your omnipotent creator? It’s all just so fucking stupid and half-assed, and clearly has been turned out by people who have “greater” priorities than just delivering a good story. This is indicative of what goes on behind the scenes in modern Hollywood – story, plot, characterization, none of that matters now. It’s all watered-down bullshit by Twitter obsessives who want to ensure they check off all the right D&I boxes in their screenplays. I mean the only thing they missed in The Eternals is a trans character, but I’m sure they’re saving that for the sequel. “I’m no longer Ikaris…I am now Chickaris!” 

Early indications were that The Eternals would be a bomb, but I’m sure it’s gone on to do well in streaming and other stuff. Shame on anyone who paid to see it, though. I saw it for free via a friend who got it on Prime or something. Actually, I know pride’s a sin and all (or at least used to be), but one thing I pride myself on is that I haven’t given Hollywood a dime in at least a decade. I cut my cable, I don’t go to movies, I don’t buy Blu Rays or DVDs of new movies, and I don’t pay to stream anything. If just a million or so more people could do that, we’d bleed Hollywood dry in a year or two…and maybe then everyone making movies now would be fired and replaced by filmmakers who don’t make woke ideology their chief concern. Because folks, don’t expect Citizen Kane or Casablanca from the social media generation. 

But then that’s just my opinion! However I watched The Eternals with my wife, who as I’ve mentioned before happens to be Chinese. Also a literal immigrant, not a liberal immigrant (in the “we’re all immigrants” sense), who grew up speaking Cantonese and Malay and immigrated here when she was a teenager. So she’s a woman of color (she hates that term, btw) and she likes superhero movies, so you’d figure she’d be the prime audience for The Eternals. She thought it was stupid, too. Which pretty much says all there is to say about this dumb movie…it can’t even cater to the audience it’s trying to cater to. But then that’s what happens when you put ideology above creativity. On the other hand, The Eternals is no doubt the direction the Marvel Cinema Universe will continue to head, following its comic-book roots; comics too have been overtaken by SJW types who use the comics as a platform for their woke ideology. 

Like a certain guy once said, “Everything woke turns to shit,” and friends The Eternals is all the evidence you need.