I watched The Eternals last night…
Good things:
I like the idea of big space things the size of planets doing stuff. I think one of the Fantastic Four movies did a half-assed job of Galactus, and now the idea of big space things the size of planets can be done, I guess the new iteration of The Fantastic Four might be able to get away with doing Galactus properly.
Accents. While I’m willing to ignore the conceit that all the Eternals speak English (with the exception of Makkari, who at least interacts with people who can translate what I assume is American Sign Language) I like that all of the non-Americans speak with their own accents. I wasn’t entirely sure about Barry Keoghan as at times it sounded like he might by trying an American accent, but I don’t know - I really like him on screen so maybe I’m being a bit forgiving.
Locations. Really got the feel that they were definitely in some of these places, rather than on a soundstage in Atlanta, even though probably half of it probably was. Such is the distinction I felt it really obvious when it was a CGI city rather than a real place.
Connections to existing MCU things (and lack of) - I might have missed a couple of Easter eggs or whatever, but with a couple of exceptions (mention of ‘the blip’ etc) I felt like this existed in it’s own world, and with a few edits could have been an entirely original thing.
Bad things:
I have never watched Game of Thrones, and somehow not seen anything else these guys have been in, but after the movie finished I googled the names of the actors playing the wooden flying laser beams guy and the wooden ex-boyfriend teacher guy and wasn’t surprised to see the were GOT alumni.
I also thought that Gemma Chan was rubbish in this, and that’s the problem with selecting two characters to be leads in an ensemble - they were both (I mean Madden and Chan here) were immediately acted right off the screen by the rest of the cast.
I wish they had something more inventive for the Deviants as I’m having real trouble now distinguishing one CGI monster from another, but at least these guys were coming from the sea rather than portals in the sky. But if you asked me to draw a picture of the deviants from memory, they would absolutely not be distinct from any other CGI monster.
I thought large chunks of this movie were boring, and it was only the rather pathetic humour things that kept the momentum.
