Eternals review round-up: Marvel's latest superhero flick is 'not exactly boring, but hardly exciting either'

Marvel’s newest superhero film Eternals has received mixed reviews from critics, with a few critics calling it a “sophisticated PowerPoint presentation”. Directed by Oscar-winning Chloé Zhao, the movie features Gemma Chan, Richard Madden, Kumail Nanjiani, Lia McHugh, Brian Tyree Henry, Lauren Ridloff, Barry Keoghan, Ma Dong-seok, Kit Harington, Salma Hayek and Angelina Jolie in pivotal roles. The movie revolves around a group of ten new superheroes, who had earlier resided on Earth for 7,000 years. Despite witnessing human wars for centuries, these heroes have stayed out of it. In the movie, Thanos’ cousin Thena also appears (played by Angelina Jolie), while Marvel’s first deaf superhero, Makkari, also plays an important role in the movie. Eternals will hit screens on 4 November in Australia, and 5 November in the UK and the US. Below are some of the reviews: Variety says that Zhao has “put her highly expressive and idiosyncratic style on the shelf”, and embraced the “straight-up expository conventionality of Marvel filmmaking” after taking on the project.  The review called Zhao’s decision  to alter her style “something of a disappointment.” “Yet Zhao’s sensibility, to a degree, is there — in the casual humanity of the characters, in the flow of quip and conflict and passion (at times romantic), in the beauty of the effects, in the deceptively effortless way that Zhao scales up her logistical skills. She’s a master craftswoman, and Eternals, while too long (157 minutes? really?), is a squarely fun and gratifying watch.” The Guardian: “There’s just too much going on: it’s all headed towards yet another “race against time to stop the really bad thing happening” climax. It’s not exactly boring – there’s always something new to behold – but nor it is particularly exciting, and it lacks the breezy wit of Marvel’s best movies. One of the strengths of the MCU to date is how it has taken time to define each character individually and laid out the grand narratives over successive movies, building a sense of momentum. Here, it’s all thrown at us at once. It’s like coming into Avengers: Endgame cold without having seen any of the preceding instalments. Most mortals will simply find it too much. Bigger isn’t always better.” BBC: “Eternals is more serious in tone and more deliberate in its pacing than the average Marvel movie, with less of the usual banter and no cameo appearances by other superheroes. But, if you’re looking for the humanity and originality of Zhao’s other films, you won’t find much of it here.” IndieWire: “Can’t these movies do anything else? Is it too much to ask the most dominant kind of cinema on the planet to shake things up and challenge itself in a more significant way?” Forbes: Focusing on the lack of a compelling antagonist, the review said that the film “creates a save-the-day conflict just in time for the third act, while banking on its not unsubstantial movie star charisma. More than any previous MCU movie, Eternals feels like “just a superhero movie” and a “we’re running out of characters” movie.”