Eternals' Backlash Was Completely Overblown

Eternals, freshly released on Disney+, did not deserve the level of disdain it received from critics when it first debuted in theaters. This isn’t to say that the film is without flaws, as there are plenty to be found, but Eternals isn't the worst entry in the Marvel Cinematic Universe that many critics have perceived it as. If nothing else, it has a perfectly good story, excellent acting, and gorgeous cinematography. Eternals feels somewhat misunderstood, standing out as one of the most ambitious MCU movies to date—simultaneously its biggest strength and its biggest failing.

The MCU has existed since the introduction of Iron Man in 2008, slowly evolving into a shared universe and an entire transmedia franchise with dozens of new and exciting characters being introduced in a myriad of different ways. More than a decade of hugely successful titles and team-ups have allowed the MCU to make quite a few daring choices—some that many modern studios would normally hesitate over. This includes Black Panther as the first superhero movie with a predominantly Black cast, and indigenous filmmaker Taika Waititi crafting Thor: Ragnarok with such creative freedom that he was taken completely by surprise. With success came the opportunity for MCU movies to make bold creative decisions, but in the case of Eternals, some of these changes are considered too bold for their own good.

If only one word could be used to describe Eternals, that word would be ambitious. Watching Eternals feels like consuming an entire first season of a TV show, compressed into 2 hours and 37 minutes. Even the themes of the movie are ambitious, covering concepts like creation, evolution, angels and demons, the nature of mythology, and motherhood. The scope is quite literally epic, fitting well with the core concept that the Eternals themselves are the actual mythological figures from ancient human stories.

Eternals' Backlash Explained: Why Critics Turned On The MCU

Many reviewers note that Eternals is a “different” movie, but it’s worth thinking about exactly what that means. This is a movie that wants to be something completely new, while still being forced to fit into the standard MCU format, and that makes Eternals feel like it has something of an identity crisis. Some critics have said that it doesn’t really fit into the MCU in some ways, and they’re quite right. Whether we like it or not, over a decade of MCU has given everyone a set of subconscious preconceptions about what a Marvel superhero movie is. Watching Eternals through this lens, it’s very easy to critically write off the movie after it doesn’t check all of the boxes it’s expected to.

Eternals feels like an experiment. The storytelling is short and episodic, effectively telling a grand story as a compilation of flash fiction with a unified narrative, rather than one single storyline. A bold move, which doesn’t always work as well as it could. This gives Eternals a rather different style to Marvel's usual fare, but the rub comes with the fact that it still needs to conform to the Marvel formula: heroes are introduced; a threat is introduced; exposition happens; the heroes unite to face the threat; a big CGI battle ensues; the characters are victorious. Eternals fits into this formula while also feeling constricted by it. The resulting movie has a disjointed feel in places, with undeveloped and underused plot threads, which can feel a little jarring to viewers. This appears to be the source of most of the backlash leveled at Eternals.

One criticism made repeatedly in the mixed reviews of Eternals is that it should have been a TV series rather than a movie, and this is difficult to argue against. A TV show could have dedicated entire episodes to give full development to ideas which the movie simply doesn’t have time for. Phastos’ grief over humanity using his inspiration to build weapons of mass destruction, for instance, is the seed that could grow into a deeply moving story, had it been given enough time to be explored in full. Similarly, Kro has a valid point when he argues that the deviants simply wanted to be left alone because they view the Eternals as the villains, which could have been given a fuller exploration in a series-long story arc within the MCU timeline. The result could have been developed into a thought-provoking meditation on the nature of heroism itself. This too feels like one of the reasons why critics were so harsh on Eternals. The story tempts audiences with some big ideas and juicy concepts, but it simply doesn’t have time to develop them.

Is Eternals The Worst MCU Movie?

While “worst” is an extremely subjective thing to say, most reviewers have added the caveat that Eternals is not, in their opinions, the worst movie in the MCU. The worst movies are not the ones that are simply bad, but those which are completely forgettable. Thor: The Dark World went completely wrong, for instance, and is frequently cited as an entirely forgettable movie, so bland that most people have trouble recalling anything about it beyond the broadest strokes. Several other MCU movies are also favorite punching bags in critical analysis, both by filmmakers and writers. Avengers: Age of Ultron has critically been torn to pieces countless times for its weak plot and frustratingly nonsensical plot twists. Thor has been heavily criticized for its weak characterization and the excessive misuse of Dutch angles in its cinematography. Ant-Man And The Wasp arguably only exists because its end-credits scenes set up Avengers: Endgame.

Eternals being far from the worst MCU movie makes its harsh reception feel deeply unfair. But, again, maybe it’s less about what the movie is and more about what the movie could have been. Bad movies quickly fade away. Movies that failed to live up to their potential tend to stay much longer in the audiences’ memories, and the phrase “wasted potential,” is one that a lot of critics have used when describing Eternals.

Eternals' Critical Backlash Was Totally Overblown

A big disparity in the reviews received by Eternals suggests that audiences do not share the critics' dim view of the movie. At the time of writing, Rotten Tomatoes gives Eternals a critic score of just 47% but an audience score of 78%. Evidently, it's still an entertaining movie to watch. Eternals does attempt to fit a lot of things into a single movie but isn’t as bad at those things as most critics might argue. That said, it should be reiterated that many of the points raised by critics are entirely valid ones. Eternals is definitely not perfect, and both its strengths and flaws stem from the ambition behind it, which is soaked into every line of dialogue.

An interesting way to interpret Eternals is that, in many ways, it’s less like a 21st century blockbuster and more like the mythological origins it draws inspiration from. Western audiences are largely familiar with stories from Ancient Rome and Greece, even though they may not remember all of the details. In mythology, things frequently just happen. The characters and monsters aren’t the point of the story, because the story itself is far larger than any individual event. These stories are never analyzed in the same way as modern movies. No one argues that Perseus had unclear motivations, that Persephone needed more backstory, or that Achilles didn’t have well-developed character traits. However, these are all common criticisms for Eternals, relying on the modern assumption that every cast member is a main character who needs detailed development. In some ways, this is an assumption which the MCU itself has ingrained into its audiences by giving characters one or more solo movies to serve as their own personal origin stories.

Despite bombing in reviews, many criticisms of Eternals aren’t even applied to other MCU movies. For example, in their first appearance during Avengers, Hawkeye and Black Widow were still barely characters at all. Audiences know who they are now but, at the time, they had very little characterization yet. A few of their interactions hinted at something deeper, but audiences were left to fill in the blanks about their past and what exactly their connection was. At the time, this was picked up on by viewers as a cute way to hint that there was more to these characters than what had been shown, with some fans going so far as to write their own fanfiction about it. But the cultural landscape feels very different now. If Avengers was among Marvel's upcoming releases for 2022, it's easy to imagine some modern critics complaining about this line because they didn’t see everything shown on screen.

While flawed, Eternals is not nearly as bad a movie as its initial reception seems to suggest. Critics and essayists do make useful suggestions about the movie’s failings—it's very likely the film would have been better as a television series or mini-series, for instance. That said, Eternals still has many saving graces, being an enjoyable movie to watch overall. Now that Eternals is available to watch online via Disney+ and home video release, it will be interesting to see whether the audience scores continue to improve.

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