My take on this overall is that I think it’s a big success by MCU terms. If I were ranking MCU movies (and I am; every time I see one, I update my little internal hierarchy thing), this would probably be top five. I am genuinely baffled by the negative critical reaction, which seems to be driven one part by judging this by different standards than other MCU titles (a shockingly large number of negative reviews boil down to “but it can’t escape its comic book origins,” which like okay but are you mad that it tried?) and one part weird regression to the ’90s-era inability to deal with genre films (like referring to its “impenetrable” plot, which is actually explained very straightforwardly and is ultra-clear).

I suspect that part of what drives the judge-by-other-standards thing is that this movie feels tonally very different from other MCU stuff. I mean, yes, all the movies are tonally different from each other in a bunch of ways, but this one takes things into a kind of science-fantasy epic direction that the MCU hasn’t gone previously — the long sweep of history, a whole-ass theogony. It fits as awkwardly into the MCU as the original Eternals comic fit into the Marvel Universe, tbh.

And I think that to a real extent, the movie would be better if it were given more rein to ignore comic book conventions — like, skip a couple of fighty battles (which are fine but by far the weakest and most conventional part of the movie), and the movie’s themes come through clearer and its real conflicts are foregrounded more. But look, it says Marvel right upfront, and if you weren’t complaining about climactic fighty showdowns in other movies, it seems weird to let it be a deal-killer for you here.

But beyond that, there’s just a lot to recommend. The characters get a reasonable amount of development considering how many of them there are; the broad sweep of time mostly works well[1]; the core conflict is one of the most interesting since Black Panther; it’s shot gorgeously (which even the negative reviews note); and there’s just enough of that MCU humor to keep things from getting too portentous.

There are critiques to make, for sure — most of which I made above — and I would have liked to see the movie go even harder in being weirder. But given the level of ambition this movie is working with and the constraints of the franchise it’s working in, it’s remarkable that it’s as successful as it is.

Highly recommended to any MCU fan, and if you’re not watching the MCU you couldn’t possibly care.

  1. The one thing that doesn’t quite work is that the heroes mostly don’t feel like long-lived immortals. There’s a degree to which this makes sense, but like… a couple of them are in relationships with mortals, but you never get any reference to deceased beloved mortals of the past; and you never see characters holding social attitudes out of historytimes. Immortality is just kind of dropped as far as how it affects their characters, which doesn’t quite see right. ↩︎