Eternals (2019)

 I've been fascinated by movie reviews for Eternals lately. It's shocking how varied they can be, not only in terms of the difference between critic scores and audience scores (52/65 on Metacritic and 47/78 on RT) and the differences between the love-it/hate-it crowds, but the specific points that people seem to like and dislike. I can't help but wonder if this is intentional.

To begin with, the movie itself. Eternals features 10 diverse main characters doing some comic-y shit with a little bit of action and a little bit of drama. After watching the film, I was overall disappointed with it, but I could easily point to several small details that I loved. I found myself thinking, "You know, it was pretty good. I liked the such-and-such." And I realized that I've been saying that more often lately, and that this was probably a strategy that these films were employing intentionally, to trick people into thinking that these films are good.

For me personally, I really liked Barry Keoghan's performance. I was psyched to see Richard Madden and Kit Harington again. You better believe that I was happy to see Ma Dong-Seok. Also, paper boi, paper boi, all about that paper boi was great. There was a fight scene that I liked. I'm a proponent of diversity and inclusivity in film, so I was pretty cool with a deaf character and an openly gay character. (Bonus points for on-screen kiss between two men, but I still have to complain that the scene itself could be easily cut.) I was pretty pleased seeing the cosmic weirdness of Jack Kirby in a film. And...that's about all there was to it. 

Just to be clear, if I say "everything else was bad" there is a lot of things that fall under the category of "everything else". For like, the three characters that I thought were interesting, there's seven other characters that are flat. The plot is just running in circles for two hours. There's a lot of unnecessary garbage with Dane's character to set-up something in a later movie. The CGI is godawful and the character designs, especially the monsters, are bland. I can't remember a single tune or musical moment from the film. The colors are mud or beige. It's bad, is what I'm trying to say.

And, I think that didn't really matter to the filmmakers. I mean, not that the film was sloppily or lazily made, because especially with these large blockbuster movies, there's a team of scientists working behind the scenes to try to maximize audience enjoyment from these things, but not in a cohesive way. See, because for the A24-loving, liberal cuck, comic book nerd there's a handful of things that I enjoyed, so even if the movie was terrible, there's a couple of things I liked, so I don't feel too negative. For a different person, there's a different set of things that they enjoyed. I can imagine a mom somewhere being really happy to see Angelina Jolie on screen, with a little romantic subplot and lot of dramatic scenes. Somebody probably liked the fact that there was a deaf character or people who like Kumail Nanjiani. Somebody liked the love triangle. Somebody was grateful that the whole thing wasn't too loud or too bombastic.

Just to be totally, unambiguously clear here, diversity in film is good. At the same time though, we have to acknowledge, albeit cynically, that diversity is also a business strategy. We all want to see a good film, but given a large enough audience on a global scale, there's going to be a percentage of people who are tipped in the direction of paying to see a movie based on the presence of an actor. 

And Marvel movies do this a lot. In Black Panther, there's a scene where the lead characters travel to Busan. It's nice, actually, there's a change in scenery, and the neon streets of Busan look cool during the car chase scene. Nevermind the fact that it doesn't really make any sense that an African smuggler traveled to South Korea to sell African products to Americans, but whatever. This scene is in the movie because they wanted to appeal to South Korean audiences.

Because I'm not South Korean, I could correctly identify the pandering in that film, but now, they're getting better, or I should say, more widespread in their tactics, so I feel less able to pick up on this strategy. For example, I saw Shang-Chi for Tony Leung. After, I thought, well, the movie was bad, but I'm happy to see Tony Leung so it's pretty good I guess. I saw Black Widow for Florence Pugh. "Terrible movie, but Pugh's performance was great, so...". "I hated that movie, but I was really happy to see Willem Defoe and Alfred Molina again." I could go on and on.

Anyway, don't be tricked like this. If a bad movie has one or two good components in it, it is still a bad movie. Eternals sucked.