The Eternals (MCU)

I’ve seen a few people refer to this movie as an Avengers type movie. But it’s not. These guys are a team. They are introduced as a team and work as a team almost the entire film (give or take a few characters).

Avengers and GotG are solo heroes who team up. Most of the fun in those movies is seeing solo heroes fight with each other and become a team. The Eternals was almost the reverse in that the team fell apart as the movie went on.

I think it suffered from having too many people to introduce all at once. I’m willing to stick around for the second movie but I’m hoping it takes place off Earth. I think I’d rather see them out in the galaxy somewhere and maybe bump into Captain Marvel or GotG as their first crossover with mcu characters.

Doesn't your 1-4 path describe the majority of action movies?

Pretty much, although Marvel seems to use the CGI to an excessive degree. Some of it is needed obviously but I'd much prefer to watch a well choreographed fight scene than feel like I'm looking at a game's cutscene.

I agree with you to an extent but we're talking about characters who have super powers and big budget movies. Similar to your 1-4 path, CGI is a tenant of the movie the genre, far beyond just MCU - it is like wishing there wasn't a gun fights or horses in a western.

I agreed with the OP to 'an extent' because of a few situations where MCU movies went down that route of descending into CGI fests that didn't need to - two in particular stand out Winter Soldier and Black Widow. Unsurprisingly they are the two least super powered characters and villians so it would make sense that they stay be more grounded.

Having said that I believe Marvel were stuck between a rock and hard place with Black Widow, if they didn't have a big money CGI heavy climatic set piece at the end there would be a chorus of folk who would claim they went cheap due to disrespecting the character and/or sexism.

This thread is however about the Eternals, an incredibly high powered group of Alien robots. Sure people are entitled to their opinion and to be disappointed that it involving a big CGI set piece but that is solely down to setting expectations that were never going to be matched. This movie was never going to end with a 'well choreographed fight scene' as it wouldn't even make sense based on the characters. It is like being disappointed there is gore in a Tarantino movie.

I understand why some want something different from the ending of Marvel movies but it simply doesn't make sense from any perspective aside from satisfying their desire for change, at times change for the sake of it.

CGI is not as important as you are making out and the Tarantino analogy is a poor excuse for Marvel's lazy lights display. The Boys is about a powerful group of heroes but the action scenes have a gritty feel to them. The most gripping scene in Invincible, an animated show about superhuman beings, is the scene in which only punches are being thrown (if you know the scene, you know what I'm talking about). Was there even a punch thrown in the final fight in Eternals? Not sure why you think this 'wouldn't even make sense' when we literally see them fighting a Deviant in the opening minutes. They can slap around a giant beast but not each other? The Shang-Chi movie was an even more egregious let down because you could have had some really compelling fight sequences but instead we got another cutscene.

300 was reasonably fun, Dawn of the Dead was reasonably fun... everything else he's made is middling to poor. Zhao is much earlier in her career, but the performances she's already getting from actors and non-actors alike are fairly incredible. They're on opposite ends of the spectrum, Zhao really understands humanity and puts it first and foremost right at the heart of her stories, while Zack just wants to make shït he thinks is cool. Both valid approaches, and we need both, but I'd value her more. This was the wrong project for her though, far too much heavy lifting origin stuff had to be done for her to also properly tell a smaller, more personal story - which would be her wheelhouse.

What does previs have to do with anything? Any quick google shows that Snyder has used it extensively for his movies and even previs of Justice League was used to push for #Snydercut.

At this stage any director that isn't leveraging previs teams for blockbuster movies like these are simply out of touch or being contrarian for the sake of it. The whole thing is just a more advanced storyboarding. Choosing not to do use previs is like continuing to use a typewriter or manual film editing rather than digitally, though in this case you're not only wasting time but also limiting what your movie could be.

Have watched this on Disney+. Im not a huge MCU fan but there have been some enjoyable romps with what were the core characters. Now a lot of them have been killed off in what seemed a natural narrative climax, I was pretty uninvested as to where Marvel were heading next (**** off with the multiverse shite). So, unexpectedly, my overall feeling after seeing this is that they had come across a possibly feasible way of re-igniting a new multi-film story arc and... they've completely fumbled it.

The revelation to the Eternals of their origin and their true purpose (essentially farming humans) and the different rections of the indivduals to this could/should have been a big "I am your father" moment in a later film but here its revealed too early to a bunch of characters that the audience hasn't gotten to know yet. And the revelation is perfunctory - Arishem tells Ajak (why?), she tells Ikaris (why?), Arishem tells Sersei (why?) and audience. She tells the rest of the gang, cue flipant conclusions. In PTSD Thena, they even had an intersting root source for the team to explore and figure out who they really were and question why they were there. But no, they just get told in expostion. Pity, I do actually like the idea up-thread of a Eternals story starting with just their exploits through history (a la The First Avenger only more so) with the modern day crisis then being staged later with well established characters.

But no, we got we're getting the band (you dont know) back together followed by the formualic everyone hover in the air and throw CGI at each other. Meh.

Also, there were a couple of wtf moments in the film's own internal logic. Was that Amazon sequence shot in South America ... because it looked a lot like an English woodland with a bunch of garden sheds from B&Q thrown up. And what is a herd of alpacas doing in a rain forest? Plus, newsflash, they didn't stop the Emergence - an object that large moving out from the planet's centre and rising through an ocean as far as it did would cause civilsation-ending earthquakes and tsunamis, they should have been wiped out on the island nearly instantly for a start. Lastly, God effectively appeared in sky over a whole hemisphere, might be social consequences for that one!

Actually, possibly the most amusing thing in the film is that it manages to openly stick two fingers to both the creationist/religious (in the opening text scroll) and scientific (Arishem makes a star) explanation of the origins of the universe.

I know some will find any excuse to cry 'woke' about everything but the characters being different in this case took away some of the difficulty in keeping track of who was who. If it was 'the good old days' of basically every character being a white guy there would be even more complaints about trying to follow

Hence casting decisions ... why not a deaf Superman next time because the actor is deaf?

People are casted to match the character they play, so it seems odd to cast someone where a whole story had to be created around her being deaf, but it doesn't seem to have any relevance on the source material?

Daredevil would like a word...

Her deafness didn't have any impact on the story or the character though, she was just deaf. I'm not sure why you're bothered about relevance to the comics when you had to ask if the character was deaf in them. It's like you're looking for something to cry "woke" about.