YouTube link here. Check out William’s “me” hat!
We went long again this week. A fair bit of talk about the Eternals. And then one question from Azuretalon, which spiraled us into some crazy discussion about the past, present, and future of our society and our planet. So, pretty much your standard episode all around. Enjoy!
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I’m going to try to do spoilers but I promise nothing so read at your own risk if you haven’t seen it.
Okay, so Eternals…
I wasn’t excited to see this, it’s a corner of Marvel I was never really into and I only ever really tried when Neil Gaiman was writing the Eternals. Neil Gaiman who I adore and who made 12 volumes of a personification of sleep nonsense into something utterly fascinating. And I gave up on Neil Gaiman’s Eternals after 3 issues…
It was cool looking, it was well-acted, it was obviously diverse. If we had it before the summer of Ironman and The Dark Knight we’d all remember it fondly.
It was long and meandering and yes, a series or a couple of movies to make this team-up feeling feel earned would have been great. They wouldn’t even have had to be about the Eternals. A Dane Whitman movie with his weird girlfriend Dr. Sersei as a secondary character prior to this would have given this way more weight.
They did it in reverse, just slapping Jon Snow in here as a setup for something in the future.
I don’t think they are too bad on the ancient alien thing since there were only 10 of them and they are mostly not allowed to interfere outside of the Deviants. Phastos was the biggest exception, but even then he was mostly handing out ideas, not just straight up manufacturing things. My take is they were there to keep the evolutionary pressure manageable. They were the hand that held the pruning sheers of the deviants to keep the deviants from being too effective.
The accent and diversity were fine, my thought there is that either they influenced the cultures they existed in or my favorite one. they were molded into the likeness of future humanity by the celestials on purpose, possibly even based on real humans and their real accents that would eventually exist.
The underlying Aesop of the story… yes was there and a bit heavy-handed
Humanity as special? Again I think maybe the deep reverence and love of humanity was something intended by the Celestials that backfired. Wouldn’t be the first time in that movie that happened. The only real evidence aside from a general “People are special” was that the Earth undid Thanos’s plan and saved half the universe. I guess that might earn the planet a pass.
I think that’s all my thoughts on that movie.
I lied, one more thought… the two mentions of DC properties as in-universe fiction…. that had me reeling.
Gaiman was also MY introduction to the Eternals! Trish bought me the first trade collection. And yeah, it didn’t do so much for me, either.
You bring up an interesting point about the ancient aliens aspect. If they’d stuck with the source material, it would’ve been MUCH worse in that respect.