Many people said that Marvel is a conveyor, that their films are the same type, made according to one successful but boring formula, that there is no author’s view in these films, that the studio should give directors creative freedom, experiment. Get it and sign it. In its 26th film, the studio for the first time (excluding the most initial films) made a bet on the author’s vision and allowed a person to create. But it so happened that this car of trust was given to an absolutely inexperienced director and filmed his Justice League - the same pretentious, boring, undisclosed and unnecessary to anyone. Yes, Chloe Jao has an Oscar and a bunch of other awards, but for a completely different genre, and Marvel was too quick to catch what they thought was another genius on the rise. It didn't work, it didn't fartanula. In addition, Marvel bet on the Chinese market and the agenda at the same time, but did not take into account that these are mutually exclusive items, and Chloe Jao herself is a disgraced person in her homeland. As a result, the film did not get into the Chinese box office at all, and besides, no one appreciated the most tolerant team, even toothless Western critics.
I was warned in advance that the film is not an action film, but a strange sluggish stream of consciousness, so I tuned in at once and did not feel disappointed on this point. But the rest of the film does not deserve leniency. There are a number of fundamental reasons why the film fails at the concept level:
- In the comics, the Eternals team consisted mostly of men. Once again, half of the characters have changed gender. The studio did not believe in the original concept.
- Some of the actors are selected so as to be as similar as possible to already known heroes. Ikaris is a copy of Bucky Barnes, Gilgamesh is a copy of Wong, and Ayak looks like the Scarlet Witch. I emphasize that this could not have been a coincidence. When three characters on the team look like three other familiar and beloved characters, it’s a conscious decision of the studio, i.e. it didn’t believe in the new faces on the screen.
- The film is like Terrence Malick’s pretentious Tree of Life shit that I had the misfortune to watch a few years ago. Very long and tedious, beautiful and meaningless director showed completely incoherent scenes: the father yells at the children, people washing their feet on the column, dinosaurs slowly evolve, trees grow, planets move, people walk along the shore with a crowd of hands – and this porridge continued and continued, depriving the viewer of the understanding of what he is looking at. I didn’t expect to see that from Marvel.
- The film is banally boring, boring, long. His script is just disgusting, it doesn't work, there's practically no history. The viewer does not feel the increase in action, does not feel intrigue, he does not understand why he is watching it. For some reason flashbacks are shown in different eras, but only in one of them there is a plot point. The lion’s share of timekeeping characters just talk. The exhibition is simply explained in words, not shown. This is the failure of cinema as an art.
- It’s one of those awesome movies where it turns out the investigator was the killer all along. So Ikaris killed Ayak so no one would stop the Celestial from waking up. At that point he had already won, he just had to sit down and wait. Instead, he went to assemble the team for the exact opposite purpose. It’s such a delusional, meaningless scenario that the mind of a normal person can’t accommodate it.
There are fewer movie sins, but I can’t ignore them either:
- How could the Eternals not have intervened in the Infinity War when half the population of the universe was at stake? This very population is necessary to the Celestials, that is, falls under the direct responsibility of the Eternals.
- How could Ikaris and Cersi have been in a relationship for 5,000 years if they started in 575 BC? And they only got married a thousand years later?
- A nauseating joke about drooling beer.
- How could heroes live and not know that they are biorobots, they never received injuries, never got an X-ray?
- How could you burn the body of one of them? What material is it made of?
- Sercy turned the monster into a tree, no one knows how, and this is not explained and does not affect the future plot.
- She was stabbed through and healed immediately, although the film explicitly states that the characters turned off their self-healing for the final plan.
- She made Sprite human. How? This is not the ability of her or anyone on the team. Did metal turn into meat and bones? Just like that?
Celestial was frozen with the force they got from contact with him. What kind of ridiculous god can a company of servants wear like that?
- What did the eternal Hindu do in this movie? He dragged a comedy character along, talked about himself, but that's all. In fact, he only joined the team to leave. He didn't do anything in that movie.
- Blue.
- There are almost no human characters in the film. Humanity is represented by a faceless mass, and this is especially ridiculous against the background of the fact that the characters chat without interruption about how they love people. But even the author could not show why. Interesting flashbacks were needed, which would show that at different points in history people proved something to the Eternals again and again, creating a strong emotional connection with them. None of this. The image of epochs turned out to be absolutely empty and devoid of content. The movie wouldn't lose anything if they were completely cut into the bucket.
Over. A maximally tolerant team of undisclosed nouneim, engaged in high-flown dialogues and contrived conflicts, devoid of development, history, an iconic villain, who turned out to be like not the Avengers, but cheap failed Inhumans. A team of not heroes, but decadents, defeatists, whiners, wagging with idleness in their immortality, standing aside when heroes were needed by the world. The most tolerant film, trying to please everyone, so absolutely useless, with a claim to originality and philosophy, but at the same time failed the very concept of cinema. The squalor in the middle between Justice League and the Tree of Life, a tenacious, conversational arthouse for $200 million. Failure of such a level that it simply cannot be believed.