Faith in the Marvel Cinematic Universe is dwindling at a faster rate than ever these days, but if one were to nail down a starting point for this decline, many would point to Eternals as that particular culprit—or at least a major player in the downward trajectory.
Indeed, despite an embarrassment of riches among its cast and Oscar winner Chloé Zhao helming the project, Eternals wasn’t quite able to stick the landing that Kevin Feige and company hoped (and certainly believed) it would.
That was back in 2021, and looking back on Eternals‘ woeful campaign, Kumail Nanjiani—who starred in the film as the character Kingo—isn’t terribly convinced that the film’s negative reception was coming from a place of sincerity, as his recent comments on Michael Rosenbaum’s Inside of You podcast suggest.
I think there was some weird soup in the atmosphere for why that movie got slammed so much, and I think not very much of it has to do with the actual quality of the movie.
Nanjiani didn’t clarify exactly what he was referring to but the movie did get its share of review-bombing, be it over the backlash it received in China on account of Phastos being the MCU’s first openly gay superhero or whatever other myopic reason the deplorables of the world tend to single out in movies that introduce any degree of diversity into the superhero genre.
Those bad-faith attacks aside, there were plenty of legitimate reasons why Eternals wasn’t as good as it genuinely should have been.
What actually went wrong with Eternals
The obvious con of Eternals is how overstuffed it is. Even at over two and a half hours long, there’s no way Eternals was going to successfully introduce 10 brand new superheroes into the fray without some of them becoming narrative dead weight, to say nothing of the introduction of Deviants and Celestials alongside them.
Ironically enough, the most dire victim of this impossible task was Nanjiani himself, as Kingo quickly became the single most useless main character in the entire film. Thena, Gilgamesh, and Kro aren’t far behind Kingo in that regard, either.
Had Zhao not been burdened with such cumbersome parameters, Eternals could have soared so much higher. The director’s visionary eye and on-location sets could have remained as fine a combination as ever if she’d only had to introduce, say, six or seven new heroes as opposed to ten. The fascinating strength of Eternals‘ mythological approach to characterization would have had more of itself to share among the cast. Instead, it found itself haplessly juggling an unwieldy number of personalities, some of which wound up being entirely insignificant, and that, dear reader, is the real tragedy of Eternals.
(featured image: Marvel Studios)
