‘Eternals’ is ambitious and ‘refreshingly diverse,’ but is overstuffed and ‘a snooze,’ critics say

“Marvel has gotten the reputation for hiring fantastic filmmakers and flattening their styles, and while ‘Eternals’ certainly doesn’t play like anything else Zhao has done, it also doesn’t mute her vision,” wrote Esther Zuckerman in her review of the film for Thrillist.

“Amid all the magic and skin-tight costumes, Zhao has made a movie that’s both humane and earthy, but also wonderfully weird, one where the internal debates between superhumans are more interesting than the punches they throw,” she said.

Zuckerman noted that film is a bit messy and packed to the brim with plot points that bog down and overcomplicate the overall narrative.

“‘Eternals,’ of course, is part of a bigger plan, as evidenced by the much-discussed post-credits scenes that were not shown during the New York screening I attended, but immediately spoiled by some in Los Angeles,” she added. “It’s a movie that’s best when it’s floating in a more primordial space, disconnected from what came before.”

“Eternals” is storytelling on an “epic scale,” wrote John Nugent in Empire’s review of the film.

The film spans from 5,000 BC to present day, relying heavily on flashbacks to explain what the Eternals have been up to for more than 7,000 years.

“Playing on such a colossal stage, it’s inevitably challenging to keep the focus at the (super)human level,” he wrote. “Zhao takes her time introducing everyone properly, devoting much of the runtime (at 157 minutes, this is the MCU’s second-longest film after ‘Endgame’) to getting the team of ten back together, after centuries apart.”

“It’s undeniably refreshing to see such a mix in the line-up — these ancient immortals talk in Irish brogues or American Sign Language without ever feeling the need to address it — but some characters leave more of an impression than others,” Nugent added.

He pointed to Nanjiani as a standout in the film, but noted that other characters like Sersi and Ikaris are saddled with generic dialogue and “smothering earnestness.”

Much of Marvel’s latest film revolves around Sersi traveling the globe to collect her colleagues and convince them to join her to save the planet, Mick LaSalle explained in his review for Datebook.

“Some do, some don’t,” he wrote. “Some have to be talked into it. Some really don’t care either way. ‘Eternals’ is like a movie about a horse race that concentrates all its attention on characters that neither own a horse nor like to gamble.”

“It takes a special kind of movie anti-magic to make an entire audience indifferent to the potential destruction of Earth and every living thing on it,” LaSalle wrote. “‘Eternals’ manages it.”

“Seriously, what a snooze,” Johnny Oleksinski wrote in his review for the New York Post. “Fresh off of winning the Best Director Oscar for ‘Nomadland,’ Chloe Zhao has upchucked one of the MCU’s worst movies in ages.

“Angelina Jolie’s Thena has the personality of a bar of soap and an accent that suggests her semester abroad in London was the best four months of her life,” he wrote.

“All the characters are similarly bland,” he said, criticizing the superhero team for being generic and not well fleshed out. While each member of the Eternals has a special power, they do share similar abilities like super strength, invulnerability, accelerated healing and flight.

“Yet here you go, ticket buyers — another far worse, uniformed collective of super-beings with conspicuously similar powers and a vague, grandiose mission to save humanity,” Oleksinski wrote. “Well, where were our amazing protectors when several hundred innocent people walked into a lousy, two-hour, 37-minute movie Monday night?”