[Itse]

Originally Posted by Yamer

I've fully accepted that I'm a MCU fanboy as I kinda liked Eternals. It's an interesting concept if not a bit too overbaked. My biggest issue is that the film was way too ambitious. The story is much better suited to a Marvel/Disney+ series release, but the spectacle of it would have been wasted on a smaller screen. Tough situation to be in and they did the best they could, but introducing 10 characters (11 if you include Whitman) with a small backstory didn't leave them room to flesh out the individual heroes to the point of investment.

Maybe a 4-6 episode series followed by a big screen installment would have worked better.

The movie just generally had too much stuff in it.

Spoiler!

The deviants served very little purpose in the story, but took up a lot of screentime. Got to have them for the action scenes obviously, but it's pretty unsatisfying when that story thread ultimately goes nowhere.

Then you have the timespan, the extremely high number of main characters, and on top of that you have the whole celestials plot and I guess squeeze in Kit Harrington somewhere. Oh and the celestial plotline was done as a mystery which takes up more time than a straight up telling.

...and still the director specifically wanted the movie to have a contemplative mood. It's a minor miracle that the movie works at all, and I have a lot of respect for the craftmanship involved because I think outside of a couple of bad actor choices (Hayek and Jolie) the movie is very likely about as good as it could possibly be with these premises, but this one really could have used a producer putting their foot down and saying "no, you have to cut some of this out".