It’s 5th November 2021. While pretty much everyone else is trying to figure out how they’ll mark Ian Gunpowder day under strict and strictly enforced – unless you’re a Downing Street advisor celebrating ‘Tia Maria Time Thursday’ or whatever twee justification they came up with on that occasion – socially distanced conditions, I’m standing on an eerily quiet train station platform at eight in the morning. Not that long ago, this platform at this time would have been rammed full of commuters each acting as if they were the only one with any right or business to be travelling on the next service; today, there’s just me, a woman with a huge rucksack and a frankly gigantic travel coffee mug on a bench somewhere in the misty distance, and a cat that habitually hangs around at the station instructing passengers where to stand. It is still essentially – as I described it at the time here – The Abandoned Planet, but there are some signs of normality and hope. I’m on my way to the Odeon, for a rare and hugely anticipated treat in amongst months of barely seeing anybody in person in the real world at all.

Outside the cinema, with the tantalising aroma emanating through the frosty morning air from an adjacent branch of Barburrito frankly resembling the sweet smell of decadence and freedom, everyone is queueing up in polite accordance with the signs reminding you to maintain the requisite two metres between each other. It’s a long time since I have actually stood in a queue outside the cinema – special screenings aside, the last occasion I can actively recall was Batman way back in 1989, as indeed I recalled in more substantial detail here – and even longer, if it ever happened at all, since I can recall anyone in a queue cheerfully acknowledging each other and asking if they are here to see the same thing too. Not out of any forced jollity or attempt to strike up a conversation, just out of a relief of being able to address random strangers for a friendly reason after so long. Unsurprisingly, we are indeed all here to see the same thing – the new Marvel movie, Eternals.

Before the world swung off its hinges, I had already booked a ticket for the about-to-be-released Black Widow, and during the eighteen month delay that followed, even when there was talk of just releasing it on streaming and moving on, it was the thought of setting foot in a cinema again specifically to find out what all of that business with Florence Pugh and a knackered old combat helicopter was all about that really kept me going through some very bleak times; I had plenty more to say about that here, incidentally. Nothing else ever quite came close to that ridiculous yet also entirely appropriate sense of elation that I was somehow back in the ‘real’ world by setting foot inside a cinema, but there was certainly more of something approaching the same to come; thanks to the prolonged and enforced global cinema closure, the endless delays and rethinks had shunted several release dates closer together until they simply could not be moved any more, and as a consequence Black Widow, Shang-Chi And The Legend Of The Ten Rings, Eternals and Spider-Man: No Way Home would all be coming out within five months of each other. To some, apparently, this was a colossal cultural outrage and a personal inconvenience that had erased Edgar Kennedy from history and forced them to sell their click-lock flooring or something. To me, and millions of others like me, it was an indulgence we bloody well deserved and if you want to dispute that, then frankly, get over yourselves.

Shang-Chi And The Legend Of The Ten Rings – as you can find out here – tore across the screen and indeed through a bus in a high-kicking riot of retro-futuristic Martial Arts fun. It also came accompanied by a trailer for a moodier-looking effort in which an assortment of glamorously appointed misfits looked on in alarm at major moments in Earth’s history while rigidly adhering to their pledge to observe but never interfere, with a couple of judiciously-timed gags about the resilience of modern furniture and whether everyone is ‘over’ The Avengers now. This was Eternals, and although I had been inadvertently spoilered for no good reason about Harry Styles showing up as Starfox in a post-credits scene, I went in knowing little of what to expect and even though the Eternals were never amongst my favourite comic characters to put it mildly, I really enjoyed this flawed but ambitious and commendably different take on the supposed established superhero movie format – a bit of a myth in itself to be honest – and it looked as though everyone else who was there enjoyed it too. Well, apart from two ‘lads’ who felt the need to loudly and swearily declaim Harry Styles’ appearance as conspicuously as they could in case they caught ‘Masked Singer’ or something, but as I stepped back out into that chilly air with the added thrill of the Blade setup right at the end, it really did feel like a moment of serene calm in a time that was otherwise anything but. Which was why I was a little surprised to subsequently find myself apparently being told off for feeling like this.

Under no circumstances would I describe Eternals as, or even intimate that it is, a perfect movie. It’s very slightly but all the same very definitely too long, a couple of the flashbacks to their unseen presence throughout human history are rendered a little too much towards the ‘click ting stamps’ end of the literalism scale, one or two characters in the admittedly huge ensemble cast are woefully underused while other less interesting ones enjoy greater prominence on presumable account of their star billing, and overall it smacks very heavily of what you might expect when you hand an abstract and cerebral project to an arty and visionary director with a reputation for being difficult to rein in by sheer weight of creative force alone; I am not remotely suggesting that this is a bad thing, in case you were wondering. Overall, however, it worked far more than it didn’t, and this was essentially the shared response when I discussed Eternals with Miriam Kent on It’s Good, Except It Sucks here. It has some spectacular action sequences, especially in the extended climactic battle to prevent Tiamut The Celestial from essentially destroying the Earth by going for a bit of a stroll, and a stunning and lavishly maintained design aesthetic combining ancient opulence and modern digital minimalism. The script is packed with meaningful and memorable dialogue and there is tremendous acting across the board, especially Lia McHugh’s turn as existentially anguished literal perpetual teenager Sprite, Barry Keoghan as the embittered Druig, haunted by the not unreasonable belief that only he genuinely cares about their human charges as people, and Kumail Nanjiani’s movie-stealingly clueless Kingo, whose response to sheer millennia of abject boredom is to reposition himself as a Bollywood star. Most impressively of all – and most inconveniently for anyone writing a witless column about movie franchises ‘choking’ serious cinema – it aims for what might more normally be expected of arthouse cinema within an action blockbuster framework and while it arguably doesn’t quite manage to pull this off, at least the intent and the scale of ambition was there. It may well fall wide of a few of its narrative and emotional targets, but it does so in a compelling and imaginative fashion. As with anything that could be described to any degree as ‘flawed genius’, it is both interesting and challenging and at the same time most definitely not for everyone.

Unfortunately, much like Makkari and company themselves, we are not operating in an atmosphere of any such nuance. Everything has to be either ‘best’ or ‘worst’ and the extremity of your ‘take’ is valuable social media currency – a situation that ironically was not especially helped by a global pandemic – and woe betide anything that has the temerity to fall somewhere between the two. The perception that Eternals was both a commercial and an artistic disaster persists, and the fact that it was released after massive delays at a time when few were able or willing to attend cinemas, then very quickly rolled out on streaming services in an already performatively hostile atmosphere, never seems to be taken into account. Although a sequel has emphatically not been ruled out, it has also been officially confirmed that one is not in active development, so those who had enjoyed the Arishem-defying escapades and really want to find out what was going on with that big hand coming down from the sky and Starfox and Pip The Troll showing up with a hangover-riven promise to help rescue Sersei, Phastos and Kingo will just have to keep on really wanting for now. Fleeting cameos in The Guardians Of The Galaxy Holiday Special and Loki by Kingo – who incidentally was originally intended to return in Moon Knight before pandemic-related scheduling changes made that impractical – and a news report about the events of the climax in She-Hulk: Attorney At Law as well as something else a little too spoilery to mention here suggest that they haven’t given up on the Eternals completely but still haven’t quite figured out what to do with them yet. While this may well be a colossal oversimplification of a far from straightforward situation you do sometimes have to wonder how we have ended up so far off balance that the views of those who would not choose to watch, read or listen to something are afforded greater weight than those of those who would, but still, at least those ‘lads’ can come out of hiding without any fear of catching sight of an unexpected Harry Styles.

I am, of course, someone who would choose to watch Eternals. Sadly I have no idea of what that woman on the train platform might or might not have made of it – although we can be fairly certain that the cat probably considered it to be ‘BETERNALS’ – but I really wish that I did because everything else about that morning was such a perfect collision of circumstances that simply could not have happened at any other moment. Weather just so icy that you could see your breath in front of you, quiet and half-empty streets and public transport, warm-hearted contact with pleasant people with a shared purpose after so long without any at all, and a moody, cerebral and thought-provoking movie that still had Angelina Jolie flying about firing lasers out of her arms at big collapsed dessert dinosaur things which felt like the ideal fit for a world that seemed to be just on the very verge of a very gradual return to normality. Admittedly this may well have some bearing on the fact that I love Eternals so much, but if we start disassociating art from your emotional response to it, well, we’d be no better than The Celestials. So, as far as a sequel goes, our friends might well be in big trouble; but luckily, we know where to find them…

Buy A Book!

You can find much more on Eternals and what happened to cinemas and indeed the world in general during lockdown in Keep Left, Swipe Right, available in paperback here or from the Kindle Store here.

Alternately, if you’re just feeling generous, you can buy me a coffee here. They did include a coffee percolator in that Lego set of The Domo, after all.

Further Reading

Some Unspoken Thing take a look at the sheer brilliance of Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol. 2 and how and why it can somehow pack such an enormous emotional punch whilst also fair near making you laugh your head off; you can find it here. You can also find some thoughts on why Loki is not necessarily as much of a ‘villain’ as you might think – or at least not when it counts, or to be more accurate some of when it counts – in I Feel Like Everything’s Going To Work Out Fine here.

Further Listening

You can find a chat with Miriam Kent about Eternals and Druig and Makkari saying ‘we are also in this film’ in It’s Good, Except It Sucks here; you can also find our chat about She-Hulk: Attorney At Law – and THAT Eternals reference – here, and Gary Bainbridge on what happened next with that great big hand in the middle of the ocean in Captain America: Brave New World here. You can also find Mic Wright on The New Mutants, a movie that was more or less sneaked out during lockdown in the hope that nobody would notice it, here.

© Tim Worthington.
Please don’t copy this only with more italics and exclamation marks.