Guest Feature: An Eternals Retrospective

An Eternals Retrospective

… It was a good movie, and it was really about fanaticism

By Chidiogo Jennifer Eli


The Eternals opening weekend was really a diabolical time to be alive for an MCU fan who loved the movie. Each time the rotten tomatoes score dropped, something in me died a little. I always loved Eternals, and three years later, I feel vindicated because it's as good as I remember. It feels grounded and fresh compared to the slate of recent Marvel movies that feel very generated and CGI. I can't believe the lack of support this movie had. Currently, Eternals sits at 47% on Rotten Tomatoes and made under 500M at the box office, making it one of the worst movies in the MCU, both critically and financially.

Eternals is a story of 10 near-immortal synthetic beings created and sent to Earth by Arishem to see through the emergence of the Celestial Tiamut. They watch over humans and protect them from deviants- monstrous and apex race of near-immortal beings genetically engineered by the Celestials to ensure the development of sapient life on the planets seeded with nascent Celestials by wiping out the planet's apex predators (MCU Wiki). The Eternals are instructed never to interfere in the affairs of humans. However, the Eternals live amongst humans and learn to cherish them, which compels them to assist civilization. Millennia later, they have killed all the deviants, the world is developed and safe except for the whole Thanos situation, and they await further instructions from Arishem to send them back home to Olympia. They haven't seen or spoken to each other for ages. The movie is a journey of them finding out that deviants still exist and that their leader, Ajak, has been killed by one of them.

Rewatching this movie was such an enlightening experience because I started thinking this movie is really about religious fanaticism. Think about it: Arishem (god) puts a bunch of people without memories on a planet. Their only mission is to do precisely as Arishem demands, but in a plot twist, Arishem has been lying to them about their true identities. It's important to note that for all the years they have dedicated to being missionaries, they have never seen Arishem. In fact, only one of them can actually communicate with Arishem. Everything really comes to a head when they find out they are literally robots, and the home they had anticipated for several millennia to return to literally does not exist…WTF Arishem.

Ajak, their medium of communicating with Arishem, is the Prime Eternal. This system of requiring a medium makes them reliant on Ajak. In so many ways, she is also a "spiritual leader." It's not hard to see how this could be a problem because, as the only one who knows the truth about their history, she just never tells the others because they cannot communicate with Arishem. They never find out until Sersi assumes leadership when Ajak is killed. Note that the Eternals aren't democratic; the deposed leader (Ajak) transfers the mantle to a person of her choosing (Sersi) without anyone's knowledge.

The whole team struggles with the reveal that Ajak and Arishem have lied to them since the beginning of their mission. And we find out that Ajak entrusted Ikaris with the truth a long time ago but he decided to double down and follow Arishem's command and even killed Ajak, all for the mission. He is the only one on the team intensely committed to following through on Arishem's plans even when the rest of the team has doubts and chooses to stop the emergence. The only other dissidents were Sprite and Kingo. Sprite follows Ikaris because she is in love with him, while Kingo admits he does not want to interfere with Arishem's plans but would never harm his team because of his opposing viewpoint. Ikaris, however, is willing to kill his team to ensure that they obey Arishem's. There's a message there for people willing to listen.

Overall, it's a compelling story that makes sense when contained, but when placed in the broader Marvel universe, the cracks start to show. Some of the overall plot choices weaken the narrative. How are Eternals just existing, and the public doesn't know until they decide to introduce them formally? It makes me wonder why we should care about them and their mission. However, you could argue that they have been out of commission for thousands of years so they're not very significant if there are no deviants and no emergence happening.

The idea that a celestial is under the earth growing, and one day it'll pop out, and the literal earth will be gone, and nobody will know until the moment it happens is simply not believable because we all know that they can't possibly destroy the earth and its mightiest heroes that exist within it.

Finally, there's this moment where they talk of human resilience during the blip of Avengers Infinity War/ Endgame. They suggest that humans worked together and successfully brought everyone back. Wouldn't this idea be flawed because humans didn't bring the people back? The Avengers did and most of the Avengers are superhuman or literal aliens. Finally, what are the odds that out of all 10 of them, none of them got blipped?

As you can tell, I loved this movie, and I still hope every day that Eternals 2 doesn't get shelved, though it seems very likely based on the current state of the MCU.

To wrap this up, here's my personal ranking of The Eternals

Sersi                                       Ajak                                     Makkari

Phastos                                 Thena                                    Kingo



Druig                                  Gilgamesh                             Sprite



Ikaris (Flop-karis)