The Deviants, which are set up as the key villains of Eternals, are mostly wasteful and irrelevant, used as a bait-and-switch for the final villain turn at the end of the film. Directed by Chloe Zhao, Eternals has done well at the box office thus far, but has suffered from criticism from audiences and critics alike. The film was sold in the trailers as hinging on the conflict between the Eternals and the Deviants, which ultimately comes off as misleading by the time the finale of the film kicks in, making for one confusing and muddled antagonist that never feels truly earned and another that feels completely wasted.

Eternals spends a great deal of screen time setting up the Deviants, which are posed as the main threat to the Eternals (and Earth), only to find out that they are of little consequence to the final thrust of the film. Ikaris, instead, becomes the villain in an abrupt change that feels like it only exists to be a surprise, rather than a rational and realistic choice made by the character. With the human population already swollen to the point that the birth of a Celestial can take place within Earth, the small continuum of Deviants that re-emerge are more of an annoyance than a threat to the Eternals. It doesn't help that their look is fairly uninspired, with a generic CGI design that barely registers as anything more than a video game-style creature to dispatch, rather than a formidable foe to contend with.

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With so much time and energy spent on marketing the Deviants as the main villain of Eternals, the last-minute villain swap makes their presence worthless to the overall film. The mistake in swapping Ikaris into antagonist mode is that it not only wastes his journey up to that point, but it wastes all the time spent in building up the Deviants as well. The time spent on the Deviants deserved a much better payoff with a more significantly developed threat from them to both the Eternals and Earth. It also would have served to spend more time developing their overall look and design, which feels uninspired and ugly, rather than compelling or scary. Marvel has often struggled (and occasionally succeeded) with their villains, but Eternals feels like a step back in the villain department, both in the execution of the Deviants and the sudden change in Ikaris' motives.

Kingo fires an energy blast at a Deviant in Eternals.

Throughout Eternals, the Deviants leader, Kro, is seen absorbing the powers of the Eternals he kills, evolving and seemingly becoming a true threat to them with each new death. By the time the film reaches the climax, Kro, now looking more humanoid than completely computer-generated is easily disposed of by Thena, who takes him out with very little effort in a cave, while the rest of the Eternals battle Ikaris, who is trying to honor his Celestial masters and let the birth of the new Celestial take place, presumably as all of the Eternals have done on countless planets before Earth. Ikaris is built up to be a strong, lead character whose love of Sersi is what's supposed to be the backbone of the film, yet the turn happens so abruptly that the payoff feels cheap and confusing. Sersi, by contrast, is downplayed, lacking insight, charm, or personality, which makes her sudden rise as the leader feel weak and unearned.

Ikaris is a key character in the Eternals comics, and the villain change feels like a concept that might have sounded fun when concocting it, but the execution of it leaves much to be desired. By the end, he's less of a bad guy than he is a loyal subject to his creators, even if he eventually relents and turns against them at the last minute, supposedly because of his love for Sersi (another area that needed far more development). While the intentions were good in terms of going in an unexpected creative direction, Eternals is already overstuffed with exposition and characters, not to mention lackluster CGI villains, so a more concise and focused film with clearly defined villains and heroes would have made for a better start to this corner of the MCU. Instead, audiences were served up with another round of unnecessarily convoluted and ugly-looking bad guys and a twist ending that makes what should have been a great new character to the franchise little more than an ironic punchline.

Next: Why Arishem Doesn't Kill The Eternals After Tiamut's Death

 

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