Eternals is one of the MCU’s strangest experiments. Arriving during the COVID-19 era with a group of characters unfamiliar to most Marvel fans, Chloé Zhao’s film attempts to tell an epic story spanning thousands of years while introducing 10 superheroes, establishing an entirely new corner of the MCU and exploring questions about humanity, morality and the nature of existence. It is a lot to ask from one movie. There is an excellent film buried inside Eternals, but it is often buried beneath the weight of everything Zhao and Marvel are trying to accomplish.
The film’s most compelling idea is the conflict between duty and free will. The Eternals are sent to Earth with a singular purpose: protect humanity from the Deviants until the Emergence can take place. For thousands of years, they follow that mission without questioning the larger purpose behind it. But separating and living among humanity changes them. They witness civilizations rise and fall, experience love and loss, build friendships, create families, and watch countless generations of humans come and go. Immortality becomes less about having endless life and more about being forced to repeatedly confront the impermanence of everyone around you.
Phastos perhaps represents this transformation better than anyone. He begins as an Eternal whose technological gifts allow humanity to advance, but his relationship with humanity becomes deeply personal. He eventually marries and raises a child, giving him a family that makes the preservation of human life more than an abstract responsibility. At the same time, he carries the guilt of having contributed to technological advancements that helped make the atomic bomb possible. The weight of watching humanity use his gifts to create something capable of mass destruction fundamentally changes his relationship with his mission. For Phastos, humanity’s capacity for both creation and destruction becomes impossible to separate from the people he loves.
That tension is ultimately personified by three Eternals: Ikaris, Druig and Sersi. Ikaris believes their duty comes before everything else. He is uncompromising because he genuinely believes the mission gives his existence meaning. Druig reaches the opposite conclusion. If he has the power to stop wars and prevent people from killing one another, he believes he has a moral obligation to intervene. Sersi finds herself somewhere else entirely. After thousands of years among humans, she has come to recognize the intrinsic value of human life. Humanity isn’t merely something the Eternals were assigned to protect. It has become something worth protecting for its own sake. When Sersi learns that billions of people must die for the Emergence to occur, she cannot accept that the greater good outweighs the lives she has spent thousands of years learning to love.
That makes Eternals surprisingly interested in the question of whether a greater purpose can justify individual suffering. The Eternals are effectively immortal beings asked to sacrifice an entire planet because it serves a cosmic function. Their decision becomes less about superheroes stopping a villain and more about whether they have the right to reject the purpose for which they were created. The film’s ideas about immortality strengthen that conflict. These characters may be physically immortal, but they are not emotionally detached. Time changes them. Humanity changes them. Loss changes them. Eventually, the beings who were created to protect humanity become human themselves in everything except biology.
Zhao handles that scale with some beautiful imagery, particularly when the film moves through historical periods and allows the Eternals to exist alongside humanity. She also deserves credit for making a team of 10 characters relatively easy to follow. The problem is that the movie cannot give all of them enough emotional development. Sersi and Ikaris dominate the narrative, which makes sense for the central story but leaves characters such as Makkari, Thena and Gilgamesh fighting for meaningful screen time. The 156-minute runtime is understandable given the amount of material, but the film still begins to feel its length in its later stretches. The modern-day landscapes are also frequently dark and bleak. That can be interpreted as a visual reflection of the impending Emergence, but there are moments when the film simply feels visually dim rather than intentionally atmospheric.
Gemma Chan gives Sersi the emotional center the film needs. Her character’s ordinary life in London, her relationships with humans and her love for humanity make the Emergence conflict personal rather than merely cosmic. Richard Madden, meanwhile, gives the MCU its closest equivalent to a Superman-level character. Ikaris is powerful, confident and almost impossible to move once he has decided what he believes is right. Madden plays him as someone whose conviction has hardened into an inability to compromise, which makes his eventual conflict with the other Eternals more tragic than it initially appears.
Kumail Nanjiani’s Kingo is arguably the film’s most entertaining character. His decision to become a Bollywood star (for three generations) after the Eternals separate gives the character a wonderfully absurd existence, and Nanjiani’s comedic timing provides the movie with some much-needed levity. His relationship with his longtime assistant, Karun, who follows him around as a documentarian, is one of the film’s best sources of humor. Barry Keoghan’s Druig provides an effective ideological counterpoint to Ikaris. Where Ikaris believes obedience is his duty, Druig believes possessing the power to prevent suffering creates an obligation to use it. Sprite, meanwhile, offers perhaps the saddest exploration of immortality. Being eternally trapped in the body of a teenager means she has spent thousands of years watching her peers experience adulthood, romance and family while she remains physically frozen in adolescence.
The Deviants are where the film’s excess becomes most apparent. They are largely mindless monsters, their CGI design is distracting and they never feel like the genuine threat the movie wants them to be. More importantly, their storyline isn’t necessary to the film’s strongest ideas. The movie could have removed the Deviant plot and concentrated on the Eternals’ ideological fracture, the Emergence and the consequences of their decision. That would have given the central characters more room to breathe while eliminating a villainous subplot that ultimately feels disconnected from the more interesting conflict.
The action does have its moments, particularly when the 10 Eternals fight together and their different abilities combine into something visually distinct from the usual MCU team battle. Angelina Jolie’s Thena is especially effective whenever she gets to fight, even though the film doesn’t give Jolie nearly enough to do. Some powers, however, are more naturally suited to combat than others. Ikaris’ eye blasts and Kingo’s energy projectiles can easily translate into action, while Phastos’ inventions are more useful strategically than in direct combat. The movie is at its best when the powers feel like extensions of the characters rather than simply different variations of superhero abilities.
Ultimately, Eternals feels like a movie that might have worked better as a miniseries. Giving individual episodes to characters such as Sersi, Ikaris, Druig, Phastos and Thena would have allowed their thousands of years on Earth to carry genuine emotional weight while giving the ideological conflict between them more room to develop. Instead, Marvel tries to fit an enormous mythology into one sprawling feature. Released during a period when audiences were already beginning to show signs of superhero fatigue, Eternals had the additional burden of asking viewers to care about 10 unfamiliar heroes while the MCU itself was expanding at an unprecedented rate. Its most consequential ideas, including the emergence of Tiamut and the cosmic implications of the Eternals’ existence, have also struggled to receive the follow-through they deserved. The result is neither the disaster its reputation sometimes suggests nor the masterpiece its ambition occasionally hints at. Eternals is a fascinatingly flawed experiment, one whose ideas about duty, humanity, identity and immortality are considerably better than the movie built around them.