The first teaser for Chloé Zhao’s entry in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Eternals, arrived this morning, offering all the natural splendor that could make a set-in-his-ways studio honcho like Kevin Feige reconsider ever working with a green screen again. You know, stuff like location shoots and sunsets and sweeping natural vistas that wouldn’t look out of place in Zhao’s Best Picture- and Best Director-winning Nomadland. As we glimpse the millennia-spanning, humanity-shaping activities of the immortal aliens first introduced to Marvel Comics by Jack Kirby in 1976, the Eternals teaser even forgoes the now-customary trailercore lullaby needle drop, opting instead for the original article: Skeeter Davis’ recording of the melodramatic slow dance “The End Of The World.” “Gaze,” Salma Hayek’s voiceover might as well be saying, “upon a different kind of Marvel movie.”
But formulas being formulas, the grandeur and observe-and-guide-but-don’t-interfere actions of Hayek and her co-stars—including Angelina Jolie, Kumail Nanjiani, Gemma Chan, Brian Tyree Henry, and Richard Madden—can’t last forever. Like Thor: Ragnarok and Guardians Of The Galaxy before it, Eternals teases some fresh angles for the Marvel Cinematic Universe until the ominous storm clouds start rolling in, promising the threat of a climactic showdown with The Eternals’ similarly long-lasting nemeses, The Deviants. But at least before those portents and echoes of past superhero battles with shafts of light from the sky, there’s Nanjiani in the middle of some choreographed razzle dazzle (his character, Kingo, takes on an alter ego as a Bollywood star) and Lea McHugh’s Sprite doing karaoke on a jet. Plus, there’s that stinger around the well-stocked banquet table, in which the godlike extraterrestrials shoot the shit about fallen Avengers—the sort of hangout moment that made for one of the few shining spots in the most lackluster of cinematic outings for Earth’s Mightiest Heroes.
There should be more material like that in Marvel movies. Maybe there can be thanks to Zhao, Eternals, and one of several bizarro cosmologies Kirby wove during his illustrious comics career. Those clouds seem to indicate otherwise, though.
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I’m gonna be honest: I know very little about Eternals. All I know about them is that they were made when Jack Kirby came back to Marvel in the 70’s and decided to keep writing New Gods with the names filed off and with a dash of Chariots of the Gods.I did read Neil Gaiman’s mid-2000’s revival attempt on Eternals but that was years ago.I can tell you about Black Knight ties into Marvel’s relationship with Aurthurian lore. Namely that Excalibur is real and that it’s currently weilded by an English Pakistani woman named Dr. Faiza Hussein.
Question, the stinger “joke” on the trailer. Was that guy suppose to be The Black Knight saying “Maybe I can lead the Avengers?” If so then I guess it sorta makes sense, since he did in the comics and its a wink wink, nudge nudge sorta thing but in the context of the trailer its a lead balloon. We don’t know who any of these people are so this random guy saying “Maybe I can lead them” and then everyone laughing at him was just a bad beat to end on.
Kit Harrington is playing Black Knight in Eternals.
I’m really curious how Black Knight ties into all this, because he’s always been a favorite Avenger in the comics and his origin doesn’t have anything to do with the Eternals. I wonder if they are tying in his later connection to Sersi somehow to his origin.
Apparently in the 90’s, Black Knight and Sersi were a thing.
Yeah, during the Harras run. It doesn’t get much love (the leather jackets is oft mentioned), but that was my team growing up and I have always had fondness for that lineup, and Black Knight and Sersi’s story from those years in particular. It would be awesome if they do the Gatherers story in a sequel. Fun little thing I’ve noticed: in the 80s/90s, Black Knight and Hercules’s two main runs with the Avengers coincided with each other. So I’m hoping Hercules is setup in this movie, too.
Assuming Russell Crowe was just trolling everyone about playing Zeus in Thor4 (as it should be called), then I’m guessing that Hercules is being set up in that film.
Yes, it would be better for Herc to be associated with the actual Greek Pantheon rather than the “fake” Eternals version.
“Assuming Russell Crowe WASN’T just trolling everyone”
Me and my bloody typos.
Thor 4: More Thor
“Black Knight and Hercules’s two main runs with the Avengers coincided with each other.”Indeed, I always thought one of Dane’s great moments as an Avenger came when Zeus kidnapped the team to Olympus to punish them for Hercules’ injuries sustained in the Masters of Evil’s attack on the mansion. I recall a splash page of Dane, wielding the Ebony Blade and Cap’s shield, as the last man standing, facing down Zeus. (Laserface, do your thing here.)
Yeah, but his gimmick is that he’s kind of a nerd when it comes to history, especially medieval history. He’s probably been researching the Eternals and how they’ve interacted with humans over the years.
That could work. In the comics, he was also exiled to the Middle Ages for a bit, so I wonder if they are going to change it that he’s a human knight from then that is somehow granted immortality by association with the Eternals (re: Sersi).
Got it, so the “joke” at the end doesn’t work at all then.
Was that guy suppose to be The Black Knight saying “Maybe I can lead the Avengers?”I think that was Ikaris, not Black Knight.
Black Knight is being played by the other Stark Brother (from GoT).Interestingly, there’s a Black Knight mini-series on the shelves right now, where the character is being written as a oddball cast-off. I assume the book’s release lines up with the film’s previously-intended release….but it is the least-flattering version of the character I have ever read (and I read the tiny-jacket Avengers run in the 90s).
The various white guys of Game of Thrones constantly get mixed up in my mind (so I may be misunderstanding you), but the captions on the video say the guy delivering that “Maybe I could lead them” line was Ikaris.
Watched the teaser with subtitles, can confirm that was Ikarus. Doesn’t mean anything to me, mind you,, but the line is attributed to him.
The captions on the video say Ikaris.
lol lol yes I missed out on the insider for sure.
The only Eternals I am even slightly familiar with is Sersi and Gilgamesh, and that’s only because they were Avengers, as basically everyone in the Marvel Universe has been at one time or another.
Now everyone has been an Avenger. In the early 90s when those two were members, it was still a bit more exclusive.
The new Eternals series by Kieron Gillen is pretty good so far, also a new Black Knight series by Si Spurrier.
Anyway the biggest connection between them is that the Black Knight and Sersi were a thing when they were both in the Avengers in the 90s (when everyone was wearing leather jackets for some reason)
I’m gonna be honest: I know very little about Eternals.
Then maybe you shouldn’t be posting?
I joke of course, not sure many people are big on The Eternals. I too read Gaimen’s series back when it came and it left no impression on me whatsoever.This trailer looks different. I’m intrigued.
I do know my Taffin, though!
The Eternals in comics to me were always that boring superhuman society set apart from the rest of Earth, but not the Inhumans. They popped up here and there, mostly in Avengers, and I never quite understood them. I liked Sersi’s tenure as a member of the Avengers, and Makkari’s role in Quasar. I could never quite keep straight Deviants and Lemuria and Lemurians whenever they came up except that they all lived under the ocean, and didn’t care to figure it out. But this trailer looked awesome.
Yeah they’re basically the Inhumans without the slaves.
TBH until this movie was announced, I only vaguely knew about them. I thought they were the Marvel version of the New Gods, only without Darkseid.
Thanos is related to the Eternals so not even not tbat.
The Thanos connection was a retcon, though, and he never really interacted with them.
The only real knowledge I have is that any time they were put into the Avengers I mostly just felt bored (I think the time they had Sersi join and mostly just be in a love triangle or whatever was around the period I lost interest in current Avengers).
Not gonna lie, I’m not really that interested in this movie. The trailer looks beautiful, but it still doesn’t do much to grab me. If it wasn’t a Marvel flick, I don’t think I would see it. I hope to be pleasantly surprised, as I was with Guardians.
This might be the deepest cut of all the Marvel properties so far made for movies or television. Even the Guardians, though far from household names, were coming out of a well-received Abnett/Lanning run, which served as the basic template. I’m not sure there is such a thing as a popular Eternals comic, and both Kirby and Gaiman, two of the most highly praised creators of their respective eras, took a run at it.
On the one hand, this means they’re free to do basically anything here without a lot of restrictive continuity or even basic character traits, but on the other, it also means nothing has worked in fifty years.
MODOK had some even deeper cuts…
I’m the same except I totally miss the Eternals and was a big New Gods fan. Warner Bros. fucked up again by not bringing the New Gods to the screen first. The New Gods was fleshed out so well by Kirby it sucks someone with balls isn’t using it.
Narrator: It was not.
Hahaha make your jokes, but did you know the giant beam of light they are going to fight in Act 3 is going to be yellow this time!!! YELLOW!!! Not red or blue but YELLOW!!Gonna be honest, I love the MCU movies and I will watch the shit out of all of them but part of the appeal is that they are all very much similiar. The TV shows are doing more “outside the box” stuff and some of these outlier movies are as well, I am sure Eternals will be different then a lot of the movies but not that much different. Doctor Strange or Guardians level different.
“We must stop [insert villain] from getting [The MacGuffin] which will allow him to destroy all humanity.”
“Is this different from the last thing that almost destroyed humanity.”“Totally. It’s, uh, even MORE destructive.”“Also, why do we care about humanity, anyways? We sure don’t care about destroying their cities as we fight our battles.”“There is great potential in them. They are special.”“Special how? A third of them are pre-diabetic and they all watch reality TV. ”“They, uh, possess this strange thing we do not understand: Love.”“Oh, I don’t know….”
I can see how that tracks for the big Avengers films, but I don’t think that template fits for Ant-Man, Spider-Man or Captain America movies. Heck even Black Panther was about challenging power structures (to some degree).
Oh god, the Spider-Man movies are some of the most generic superhero stuff Marvel makes.
Black Panther does use the very common MCU thing of “The villain has some good beliefs but he wants to go too far”, to its detriment. (And the less said about the good guy CIA agent the better.)
“Also, why do we care about humanity, anyways? We sure don’t care about destroying their cities as we fight our battles.”I don’t think this is a fair criticism. The movies have always gone out of their way to show that the Avengers make good-faith efforts to avoid civilian casualties, and are visibly distraught when they fail.
When aliens show up in New York, Cap (in the first Avengers) and then Stark and Doctor Strange (in Infinity War) make a priority of evacuating civilians and containing the spread of the fighting.In response to an out-of-control Hulk in Age of Ultron, Stark’s first response is to trap the Hulk in place. It’s only after the Hulk breaks free of the metal dome that Stark puts in place that Stark has to beat him into unconsciousness.The explosion that kills Wakandans in Lagos in Civil War was only the result of Wanda preventing a suicide bomb from going off in the middle of a crowd of civilians.
Hell, even the Ravagers got into the civilian-protecting racket during GotG’s third act.
Pretty much!
I thought that was the point? At a certain point it’s just not a superhero movie— because that contains certain expectations. Shit, why can’t we just say this movie is a different kind of Americana drama film while we’re at it.
But but but it’s shot in natural light
Chloe Zhao brings such emotional intimacy and immediacy to the scene where Gemma Chan punches Kro through three rows of cinderblock walls and says, “Hard enough for ya?”
She directed one of the greatest actors of our generation through an Oscar-winning performance. I’m excited to see those skills shepherd Richard Madden through looking at a viewscreen to be cgi’d in later, look up and say “we’ve got company,” and just really sell the idea that there’s company and they’ve got it.
She really inspires the actors to new heights of authenticity as they interact with a chroma green foam ball meant to represent some kind of alien creature that may contain the key to humanity’s salvation.
I enjoyed the bit where they described how they interfered, then said that they never interfered. Top notch writing.
Sure, the basic story structure is just good vs. evil at the end of the day and is kind of hard to continually reinvent the wheel or even keep it interesting sometimes, but it is kind of silly to say they are all the same.
Change a bit here and there, but ultimately, these films do nothing for me, because there’s never really a chance the heroes will lose. Oh, sure maybe a few will die in an act of Wagnerian sacrifice, and maybe the villain might seem to get the upper hand, but always the heroes will win in the long run, or the sequel. And this just doesn’t cut it for me.
Is that the case for most Hollywood superhero movies? I wouldn’t just pin that on MCU.
“Isn’t”
Understandable, I also don’t think it helps that there is such a glut of superhero products these days either. I love the Marvel films but they have had some bad side effects
I believe when the aliens come and must decide whether humanity is worth saving or not, the Funko Pops will be our ultimate damnation.
but always the heroes will win in the long run, or the sequel. And this just doesn’t cut it for me. So… the only dramatic power a story has for you is whether the good guys win or lose? Nothing about their journey along the way, or the potential for character development, is interesting?
all of the characters develop in the same way, so no not really
So 90 to 95% of all recorded storytelling throughout the history of mankind isn’t doing it for ya, huh?
the hero didn’t win in the oldest story we know about
For someone with the name “CineCraft,” your understanding of the Hero’s Journey is pretty dogshit.
The first year creative writing student sure showed me.
Man, not to be a downer. But not in the mood for more ancient aliens bullshit and that Avengers joke was terrible. But at least it looks pretty and has a nice cast.
I’m getting flashbacks to Ang Lee’s Hulk. I get the attraction from both angles — having a serious dramatic director adds prestige to the movie, and said serious dramatic director would like the financial and popular success that they can’t get from doing arthouse movies. But is it a good fit?
I’m getting flashbacks to Ang Lee’s Hulk…having a serious dramatic director adds prestige to the movieNothing more prestigious than Hulk poodles.
I will defend Ang Lee’s Hulk (to a certain degree) in that I think it’s a very good film, but not a very good superhero film. Visually the comic book pages thing was very good and I liked the father/child motif that was running through it with Bruce/David and Betty/Thunderbolt.
It’s just the ever increasing (in height) Hulk got more silly each time it happened and the gamma dogs sucked.
Yeah, but Nick Nolte got to chew some scenery and eat some electricity.
Big deal he does that everyday.
There was some really good stuff (definitely the father/child juxtapositions, and the desert army fight). But yeah, the gamma dogs were the worst and I disliked turning his dad into some weird version of Absorbing Man. That was left field and made the movie that much longer for no reason.
The Absorbing Man stuff was equally as stupid as the gamma dogs, but I won’t begrudge Nick Nolte the chance to ham it up a little.
That one also got it right as far as comics accurate Hulk as far as abilities and powers and the look and personality down of Thuderbolt.
I really disliked the comic book panel look and think its flawed logic assuming that dividing a film screen into panels will make it more comic book. The rare times this trope does work — as in Creepshow— the filmmaker is usually going for kitschy feel on purpose. And the shot of mutated poodle head bursting through the windshield was one of my favorite images in the film.I do, however, love the father/child dynamic in the movie. Jennifer Connelly and Sam Elliott are my preferred Betty and Gen. Ross, Nick Nolte was also very good, although I wish the script had made him into a version of The Abomination or The Maestro rather than that air, water, rock thing.
Agreed. I actually liked it more than the Incredible Hulk reboot film.At least we finally have a keeper with Mark Ruffalo’s great casting as Bruce Banner and Hulk. Depending on whatever he’s actually finished with being in Marvel films, hopefully we’ll see him again.
Ruffalo is set to appear in the She-Hulk series.
If she can avoid those distracting “comic” panels and actually incorporate the source material well rather than weird digressions, I think she’ll do fine. She’s apparently a super Marvel fan, so fingers crossed.
Counterpoint: Ang Lee’s Hulk rules, and has actually aged like fine wine in an era of self-serious and ugly-looking comic book movies.
Josh Lucas even reprised his role for Ford v. Ferrari
ugly-looking comic book movies
Every frame a painting, baby.
Hulk was as self-serious as Batman v Superman, but not as self-important as Dark Night Rises…Ang Lee just isn’t very good at fun.
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon disagrees with that last part, although the part of your sentence before the ellipsis is a pretty accurate assessment. Hulk just isn’t fun enough. The only real moments of comedy in the movie involve Josh Lucas’s Talbot getting beat down (and likely, ultimately killed) because he’s a douchebag. I’ve had people act like the Gamma Dogs are a misunderstood piece of genius comedy, but the only joke there is that one of them is a poodle (well, that and that the CGI is so bad that all of them kind of resemble Slimer from Ghostbusters).
Eh you’re right. Zhang Ziyi beating up those guys in the bar is fun defined :)Yeah they should have cut to the Daffy Duck picture of Lucas in a full body cast to show he’s alive even though he couldn’t possibly have beenJennifer Connelly described Hulk as “A four person psychodrama.” That is all. I mean…these days we have fashies wearing Cap shirts who are like “Did Cap really to try to cancel Hitler?” and there’s plenty of childhood adoration fantasies to go around…but “A four person psychodrama”…
Ang Lee’s Hulk is still a top tier superhero film. There’s absolutely nothing like it, and we’ve had two decades of Hollywood pumping out superhero movies. As far as I’m concerned, the comparison is a compliment.
Marvel tends to vacillate on how much creative leeway it’s willing to give each franchise, and I’m curious to see how they’re planning on integrating this into the greater MCU, but this is shaping up to be, at minimum, a beautiful mess. Also, poor Kumail–got all ripped for like 2 seconds of air time.
I mean, he’s bound to have more to do in the actual movie.
Tbf this is the teaser trailer, we don’t know how much of the central plot involves Kumail’s character.
2 seconds in the trailer.
.
I’m sure Kumail’s wife doesn’t mind.
Dinesh?!
As Laserface said on his post I know next to nothing about Eternals and I wills say, Black widow…PassShang-Chi… PassEternals… PassNow I bet 1 or 2 of these movies are like Ant Man and Guardians and I will regret not seeing it in the theater but these movies aren’t for me.Will go see Spiderman in the theater.Now if the big G shows up to end Eternals or if he teaser or Surfer is teased I will soooooooooo regret not seeing this movie when it comes out.
Same. Their big Phase 4 movies just aren’t lighting my fire. They will probably be fine, but it feels like the expectation is to just blindly, automatically go see em because the Marvel logo is on the front. And I will. Because they’ve got me.
I think at this point viewers are expected to just accept the source material as a platform for the movies — providing a thumb sketch of the characters and narrative direction — and nothing more. It’s serving as a rough treatment for some of today’s most talented story tellers – Taika Waititi, Chloe Zhao, James Gunn, the Russo Brothers — to do what they do best, with the financial backing of a juggernaut studio and a film producer with some two dozen massive hits in notched into his bedpost. I don’t know shit about The Eternals and I can‘t wait to see this movie.
I agree. I actually see the MCU using the Marvel comics as a source text in much the same way as Disney used folk tales and children’s stories as source texts for the more traditional Disney princess movies.
Yes, exactly!
I considered myself a Marvel comic fan in the 90s. I got the trading cards, watched the X-Men cartoon, played the Avengers arcade game, read a fair number of the comics… and I am unfamiliar with everyone new they are introducing in Phase 4. Now, I didn’t know GotG either and that turned out to be good, but these seem like they are slightly deeper cuts. I hope they work out since I love the MCU and new stories I do not know sound awesome, but its hard to be excited on the onset when I am utterly unfamiliar with the source material.
I’ve been reading comics since 1979 and yeah I don’t know most of these characters and while GOTG was so amazing I think I’m a little worn out now and will probably pass on these in the theaters like I did with some others till I can watch them at home.
I recently read the original Kirby Eternals series in a graphic novel. It mostly served to remind that Jack without Stan is jelly without peanut butter. It was dumb, repetitive, poorly paced, and the characters were kinda goofy. I can’t imagine a multimillion-dollar movie in the most successful, greatest film franchise in history will make any kind of serious mis-step (like following the series closely). They have the track record. I had never even heard of Guardians of the Galaxy and that was fantastic. So I’ll go see this. But I do worry that the larger film-going public might eventually just be like “Who?” and start sitting these out.
The new Ant-Man and Doctor Strange are the only ones I’m genuinely excited for (sigh, I have to wait 2 years for Ant-Man though…). As someone who did not grow up on comic books and got into the MCU films kinda in the game, I have a mild interest in the rest and will still end up seeing them anway.
I get your reasoning on Eternals and Shang Chi, but why pass on Black Widow? She’s been a part of the MCU through all of its phases. I’m on board for all of these, but I get it, I passed on GOTG 2, never paid attention to those characters growing up, and didn’t especially like the first one.
I can’t stand her or Hawkeye. They are useless when fighting superpower foes (she was fine in Captain America 2) but in general I find her and hawkeye the time to change the channel when it’s replayed on TV.
Oh, I see. I’m indifferent on Hawkeye, but love Black Widow, I’ve been wanting a Black Widow movie for years now, so I’m pretty excited for July to get here.
That’s cool, hope you really enjoy it.
See Inhumans for how this will gohard passits more apparent now than ever, Marvel is fading quickly.
It’s going to be interesting to see how they excuse the fact they didn’t interfere during the whole Thanos thing. (you would think eliminating half of all life in the universe would warrant their attention)
BTW, Thanos is technically their distant cousin in the comics
He was the son of the leader of an Eternals faction which lived on Titan, one of Saturn’s moons.
he carried the Devient gene which is why he looked like he did, and why this fun thing happened to him when he was born:
Maybe they were off planet at the time. Probably no good in world explanation, but whatever hand wavy excuse they give is good enough for me as an audience member. Then again, I grew up reading comics, and each individual hero fought villains by themselves in their own comic that you would think other heroes would show up for, so I’m used to just ignoring that stuff I guess.
Trailers, and the talent of their editors have a way of highlighting exactly what they want to showcase. For now, this looks like Marvel took the training wheels of its director and let them direct for once. Taikia is the only recent one, and one of the few, the others being the first 4 character movies, and CA:CW, where they were allowed artistic freedom, otherwise Marvel no matter the director has made sure they conform to their box. So i am glad to see it happening again, should the trailer hold true and it be a CZ movie and not a cookie cutter Marvel, but with a named director attached.
I’m excited for this! I don’t really got all the “but I’m not just not excited for these characters”, we haven’t even met them yet? This is a new phase and I’m excited they are making it feel that way with Zhao directing.
This should be quite a rarity , a marvel movie no one cares about or watches.
No Fad Land
watch it be great, anyway.
That’s what people said before Guardians of the Galaxy.
i think that you’re reading the mood for something like this totally wrong
Nobody cared about Inhumans, and this looks to touch on much of the same territory, so you might be right. Only GotG has thus far managed to successfully turn a whole cohort of relatively obscure characters into major players, using impeccable casting, writing and pacing. Eternals looks to be a tad too melodramatic and wistful for the type of frenetic stuff MCU fans are used to at this point. I mean, this trailer could’ve easily been for a non-Marvel property if not for the “stinger” which awkwardly name drops the Avengers. Far more excited for the “Loki” and “What If” series.
Nobody cared about Inhumans because it looked like shit, the thing was steeped in internal drama (it was only made because Ike Perlmutter wanted it), it was on TV, its focus on the Inhumans was already not original because Agents of SHIELD had done it (and reception to those storylines was mixed) and even the Marvel nerds wouldn’t touch it because everyone was fucking tired with shoehorning the Inhumans into things so that Perlmutter didn’t have to promote the X-Men. Hell, the one thing people knew about Inhumans back when it was still set to be a movie was that Vin Diesel is probably playing Black Bolt (an honestly excellent casting that I hope to see one day), so once they showed Anson Mount’s miscast ass a lot of those people fucked off too.Like, The Eternals are a risky proposition but they are already miles ahead: the flick has an Oscar winner at the helm, a stellar cast and it’s looking positively weird in comparison to everything else coming from the studio, which is sure to attract both those who think the Marvel formula is stale and potential film buffs looking for something more kino from superhero movies.In addition, Marvel/Disney clearly doesn’t care that much whether it’s going to do gangbusters – just okay will likely be enough. They are likely using this and Shang-Chi to test the waters regarding hard they can coast on the Marvel brand to get by with their weirder stuff, because both of those films have no chance of getting release in China. They’ve been censoring some of them for that market, but here they flat out discarded that possibility by a) having a renamed Fu Manchu in Shang-Chi (which people are not buying there) and b) hiring Chloe Zhao, who is persona non grata at home.
Scott Lang is on line 1.
I cared enough to watch the whole season of Inhumans, mostly because there wasn’t really anything else to satiate my small-screen superhero needs that I hadn’t already seen but Inhumans was utter shit.
Yes, Inhumans was a large turd floating aimlessly through a sea of shit.
I agree 100%. It looks like an interesting movie (though no plot is really given away as it is, so who knows) if somewhere other than the MCU. It just feels too far removed from the tried and true, and the familiar characters we already know.The only way this won’t be a disappointment box office-wise is it it opens in all theaters at the EXACT weekend all the covid craziness goes back to ‘normal’ and people are clamoring for something, anything, even remotely watchable in a theatrical environment.
1. Everyone complains about how cookie cutter marvel movies are, but i can almost guarantee if they ever really try to change things in a movie, that will be their first bomb.2. Why is Black Knight there? What the hell does he have to do with the Eternals?3. It seems like visually, theyve veered off way more from the core characters than they have in any other marvel movie. It pisses me off, but if its a good movie, people who didnt read the comics wont care.
As a non-comics-reader but a big fan of the Marvel movies, I’m really amped about this. It looks gorgeous.
The Eternals are a poor man’s New Gods, which are a poor man’s Inhumans, because Jack Kirby is proof that even the most brilliant geniuses in their field need editors.But that honestly makes me even more interested in this movie, because I’m wondering how they make anything good out of that nonsense.
You’ve got that completely backwards. Eternals > New Gods > Inhumans.
The Eternals as a concept outside of the Marvel Universe (as Kirby intended) is actually interesting, as it gives them their own space to be heroes and connections to Earth’s past. When brought into the MU, they become just another secret sect of superhumans fighting a secret war with a secret group of villains. And it was confusing because there was an actual Greek Pantheon already running around the MU, so it was weird that there were two groups of godlike beings with similar power sets. It might work better in the MCU since all that other cosmology hasn’t been established yet.
Enh, his obsession with ridiculous names and splitting his Big Myth ideas into three groups instead of really making one of them work is the bigger issue I’ve got.
The ridiculous names is a stylistic choice- it’s Kirby. That he created 3 similar concepts I tie more as an unavoidable circumstance of his career (and the comics industry really) and losing access to former groups as he switched companies- he really didn’t have an option for sticking with one to make it work. That they were a bit repetitive in concept is valid. (The Inhumans weren’t really Big Myth, though, right?)
All three tie into his love of sweeping pantheon court drama featuring characters with the dumbest names you’ve ever heard.
The Eternals have common elements with both the New Gods and the Inhumans, but I really don’t think the New Gods are comparable to the Inhumans in any way. To me the New Gods are the perfected form of a lot of the themes and characters Kirby developed in his first stint at Marvel, and the Eternals are a kind of weird return to those earlier themes and characters – like, it’s pretty obviously shit that could have been done in Thor or Fantastic Four (and in fact Roy Thomas wrapped up the original story of the Eternals in the pages of Thor once their book had been cancelled and Kirby left the company again), but because Kirby refused to revisit his earlier work at Marvel when he returned he created these new characters in a new book instead. That said, I think that the Eternals reflect the work he did on New Gods in the sense that he has a much clearer idea of what he’s trying to say about the nature of good and evil than he did in the mid 60s, and that makes some of the philosophy of the book interesting to me even if the story is not.
Nah the New Gods are way more interesting than the Inhumans. And Kirby at 75% was still pretty much the greatest creator out there.Pity the film seems to take nothing from his aesthetic.
I am a poor man so I will take it!
I like the “grandness” of it and it’s got a beautiful look, but I do wish it had a little bit more zing and pep. I’m sure the next 25 trailers will convince me
The only Eternal I had any attachment to is Starfox because he was in the Avengers in 1983-ish (with Monica Rambeau Captain Marvel, MY Captain Marvel) when I went from casual comics reader who would throw or give away comics after she read them to serious (as serious as one can be at 11 years old) Marvel comics fan and collector who bagged and boxed her comics. I was aware of the Eternals but somehow never saw much of them through all the Marvel comics I read for the 2 decades I actively collected comics. And I didn’t see Starfox listed on IMDB, but did see an article say Harry Styles was supposed to play him?
Starfox was part of the Eternals of Titan (as was Thanos), which was a retcon, so he wasn’t really a part of Kirby’s Eternals that they seem to be focusing on here. I’d be surprised if Starfox shows up.
As a casual, this looks like The Inhumans to me, but prettier and with more money.
So yeah, that basically The Eternals in the comics as well. Prettier and more money than the Inhumans.
I thought Agents of SHIELD did what I thoughy was a great job with the Inhumans, shame it increasingly looks like it’s going for all intents and purposes on the scrapheap.
SHIELD did fine using Inhumans as a concept, but they, thankfully, didn’t touch the whole secret moonbase/royal family part of The Inhumans, as was so poorly done in the quickly-forgotten tv miniseries.
And better wigs
Kit Harrington really does befuddled well.
Indubitably.
I loved the teaser, it is atmospheric and beautiful and it does not show you all the big moments in the film in the trailer, which is refreshing. Even if it ends up being blah, it will be fun to go into the film without feeling like I have already seen all the film has to offer in the trailer. As much as I love me some Marvel Universe films I admit that even trying to stay away from all the hype ahead of a film a lot of plot details still end up being revealed ahead of my sitting down in the theater.
So it’s going to be under three and a half hours?
Gonna admit i don’t know the source material but this looks very very bad, full of pretty people delivering stiff perfomances as uppity aliens.
It has enough of my favorite pretty people being filmed prettily that they would have had me for an at-home viewing. That plus Marvel gets my ass to the theater.I’m really rooting for the GoT guys specifically, and Kit Harington especially. I just want him to be OK.
Better not hear praises about the muted/washed out color palette in this movie if you crapped on Snyder’s similar color palette
Ultron really does get better on subsequent viewings. You’re ready for the fuzziness and missteps, and more receptive to its themes. I mean, it’s still not great, but it’s no Thor: Dark World.
It gets ragged on a lot (and it certainly deserves it for the subpar parts) but the parts that work are amazing spectacle and fun. The good stuff outweighs the bad for me.
My boys, 7 & 11, turn it on as their go-to MCU flick. It took me a while to figure out why. It’s very episodic, handing out action on a pretty regular schedule. The exposition dumps are fine too because they’ve already seen the movie and know where things lead. Plus it introduces so much to the MCU they get all the references. And even when it gets to Clint’s farmhouse the characters and the chit-chat keep it pleasant and watchable.
In retrospect Ultron had a lot of heavy lifting to do and pulled it off fairly well.
Who is this actor at about seven seconds in? For a second my heart stopped – I thought it was Patti Smith!
It’s obviously Daniel Day Lewis.
Well said! I’ve seen Patti wandering in downtown NYC like twenty times, and she always looks exactly like that.
That would be a thrill indeed 🙂
I get very leery when a prestige indie director takes the helm of a big budget first entry in a franchise film. Yes, as mentioned, similar to Hulk. Am I the crazy one for thinking hey, it might not be the best idea to take a director who just made an intimate movie on a shoe-string budget and give them control over the direction of a high cost IP? I do like to be proven wrong so we’ll see what happens.
Who doesn’t love an emotive trailer that produces “chills?!” I don’t know much about this series as well, but I can’t wait.
It looked like a different kind of Marvel movie right up until the last bit, where it looked like every other Marvel movie.
Not feeling this yet. The trailer makes it look like a watered down amalgam of 2001: a space odyssey, Sens8 and the typical Marvel franchise. But Feige and Zhao have earned the benefit of the doubt, the cast is solid, and Barry Keoghan is an amazing actor who will probably make interesting, compelling villain.
I can only assume that we’re getting this as opposed to a rebooted X-Men is because someone besides Disney still owns the streaming rights to new movies for at least a few more years.
I have never been less excited about a Marvel movie. Don’t get me wrong, I’m still going to show up at the theater and see it, but my unfamiliarity with the source material and this lackluster (albeit beautiful) trailer just doesn’t thrill me. That being said, I’m glad the teaser doesn’t give much away and I hope future trailers don’t either. I would love to come out of the theater in November with my mind blown because the movie surprised me and exceeded my admittedly low expectations.
This isn’t Highlander so I won’t be seeing it.
maybe closer to the release there will be another trailer that has a little more action.
This time around, I’m glad that they didn’t go the Fast & Furious route of more or less spoiling the biggest action part of the climax, with 5 months to go until it comes out. (and with the inevitable response of those who don’t like how it looks nitpicking things to death and pre-claiming failure leading into the actual release, lol)
I do hope that this movie has a different sort of climax, where it’s not about “let’s blow this entire thing apart” or combat to the death. Perhaps an elaborate problem to be solved another way.
Have I missed something, is Zuras not addressed in this film at all? Hmm..
Looks like Percy Jackson.
I heard King Kirby vomit.
0:08 that’s Pocahontas from the film The New World the image is ‘PressReader Malick crafts brave New World – PressReader’ it’s supposed to be an insult The Dog Tribe the Native Americans treat them with contempt it’s rare the colour perceptors in the retina don’t form because of vitamin deficiency or because of an inherited mutation the world in black and white the brain fills in the colours more colours than you perceive (untranslatable Dog Tribe swear word for humans spits with contempt) deep ultraviolet and infrared things that shimmer appear and disappear things that were and things that will become the image of her in colour is Billy in Predator wordless “hush there’s something in those trees” I could find her she can’t read misdiagnosed with dyslexia show me a few hundred thousand high school yearbook photos I’ll find the whole fucking tribe hello Wolfenthe photograph is supposed to be Queensland Australia eucalyptus trees in the background same as the movie the Queensland jungle where they did the simulated nuke test to see what it would do the trees are too sparse for there further west the central north coast of Australia maybe the far west coast of Australia looks like the coastline in this which is from the Hawaii Five-0 titles and the film of the Big Sur coastline in a Goldie Hawn movie and is supposed to look like the Skeleton Coast in south west Africa it’s the coastline somewhere north of San Francisco pretty coastal towns a little cold and bleak for tourists except in the summer the perfect place to hidesuch liarswhere are you really
Honestly looks way too drab for a film based on a Jack Kirby comic about space gods. The spaceship looks like an iPhone casing.
How are the Eternals supposed to have ‘guided’ and ‘helped [human] progress’ but also have ‘never interfered’? Surely guidance and help *is* interference, even if it’s more positive than that word usually connotes?