'Eternals' is proof that expanding the MCU will lead to growing pains

The Eternals wasn't captivating. It felt like it had a "to-do" list.

This article contains plot information and spoilers from Eternals, the latest movie from the Marvel comic book universe. If you haven’t seen the movie and you don’t want to know what happens, then you should exit the article.

Marvel’s universe is getting big. Maybe too big.

Eternals, directed by Chloé Zhao, was emblematic of just that: an unwieldy plot with surprisingly thin character development. The movie had strong acting performances, beautiful imagery, imaginative twists and powerful casting decisions. But it didn’t quite accomplish all that it set out to do. In fact, the movie felt like it had a to-do list that was far too long.

The scale of the MCU has always been what’s most impressive about the movies. Sure, they provide incredible action and pace, but Marvel’s ability to build a canon and develop storylines from movie to movie — and with each movie often building on top of each movie — has been an enormous achievement. Kevin Feige, the MCU visionary and primary producer, may finally have started to bite off more than he can chew. Not only has Marvel invited the infinite possibility of the multiverse, but the studio introduced the Eternals a gang of superheroes (who are actually just robots).

The movie, Eternals, doesn’t have the same plot problems as Black Widow, a movie that was limited in scale because it was backdated and weaved between Civil War and Infinity War. Black Widow couldn’t have an impact because it had to fit into the canon they’d already created. Eternals had a different issue, with a set of characters that would impact the future of the MCU but had been living in secret among the Avengers (and long before that) as guardians of planet Earth — but could not impact the MCU’s past.

The first question everyone needed answering: Why didn’t the Eternals fight against Thanos? Why didn’t they intervene?

The answer was believable: Celestials had instructed them not to. The underlying plot point, however, was that the Celestials were using Eternals to protect Earth from the Deviants, another species manufactured by Celestials. The Eternals needed to protect humans long enough for a new Celestial to be born, a process that requires a critical mass of intelligent life.

That’s where the plot gets loosey-goosey. Not only is there a massive being living in the core of the Earth — which scientists somehow didn’t discover — but the Celestial needs “intelligent life,” a strange classification. The Celestials don’t consume that intelligent life. They just … need to be in the presence of a certain amount of it in order to come to life. It doesn’t make much sense. And that honestly wouldn’t matter that much if the movie, Eternals, had really won us over with strong character development. That’s what Zhao, who won Best Picture at the Academy Awards for Nomadland, seemed to set out to do: develop the Eternals as a lovable family with complicated and strained ties to one another. But that’s also where it failed, unable to meld these characters in meaningful ways. It was easy to see they were supposed to be a tightly-knit and tightly-wound family that has spent way too much time together. It just didn’t actually feel that way, with the relationships going underdeveloped.

The most obvious example: Sprite (Lia McHugh) never convincingly showed her love for Ikaris (Richard Madden) or her jealousy for Sersi (Gemma Chan). Because of that, Kingo (Kumail Nanjiani) had to tell the viewer in dialogue — twice! — that Sprite loved Ikaris. And then Sprite had to explicitly tell the viewer she hated Sersi in an act of betrayal at the end of the movie. It all rang hollow. There was no setup.

There was a refreshing level of diversity, with the introduction of a gay superhero, Phastos (Brian Tyree Henry), and a deaf superhero, Makkari (Lauren Ridloff). The casting decisions are an impressive step forward for a franchise that took far too long to feature heroes that weren’t predominantly white men. But because we met so many Eternals — including one in the post-credit scene (Yes, it’s Harry Styles. Swoon.) — it was hard to grow an attachment to any one of them, especially as they began to die off. In fact, killing off the Eternals seemed like a way to manage the sheer volume of these leading characters.

Somehow, a movie about the near-explosion of Earth ended up feeling slow. And that’s because the movie tried and struggled to develop 10 unique new superheroes, some of whom will be central to what appears to be a potential battle between Arishem, who ended the movie with a pending judgment about the fate of Earth, and the planet’s defenders.

There’s a chance this movie ends up being the Thor, one of the sleepier and clunkier movies in the MCU, to the franchise’s Ragnorok, one of the most electric and rewatchable Marvel movies. There’s a chance Eternals needed a chance to stage themselves on Earth, introduce the Celestials, explain why they’re all just showing up now and pare down the group to a more workable total. There’s a chance this group builds into something special, like the Guardians of the Galaxy. But that won’t save this movie from what it was: a movie that looked like a Wikipedia article on why the Eternals now exist in the MCU. It felt like a creaky fulcrum: a gear that set forth Eternals 2, Black Panther 2 and Guardians of the Galaxy 3.

Eternals had too many jobs to do. Eternals and Zhao couldn’t get it all done.