Eternals

This latest Marvel edition is on a slightly different tack, in that this crew predate the MCU by a few thousand years (leaving aside all the wunderbar time travel malarkey). A Celestial called Arishem sends the Eternals to Earth around 5000 BC to protect humanity from a breed of monsters called Deviants. The Eternals are slightly in thrall to a semblance of the Star Trek 'Prime Directive', meaning they can't interfere in disputes (or even genocides) but can, and must, stop the Deviants killing people. After wiping out these buggers around 1500 years ago, our space Highlanders are kicking their heels, waiting to be told what to do, when some shit starts to go down again. 

The urge to do things differently in this phase of Marvel output is clear, perhaps due to the director Chloe Zhao, fresh off an Oscar for Nomadland. She brings a sense of balance to proceedings, and even manages to be slightly more serious, albeit with some comedic touches. She has A LOT of characters to deal with and giving them all something to do is tricky. The main immortals are Sersi, played by Gemma Chan, and Ikaris, played by Richard Madden, and they bear the weight of the narrative, while Angelina Jolie's Thena, Salma Hayek's Ajak, Kumail Nanjiani's Kingo, and Lia McHugh's Sprite add much of the filling. The tough unit from Train to Busan, Ma Dong-seok, and Dunkirk's Barry Keoghan, are both standouts for me, though I kind of wish Keoghan hadn't thinned out his Irish accent. He's too easy to understand.

Thematically, there are strong links to another Marvel story thread - one that pitted one side of friends against the other - you follow, I'm sure. In this film though, the stakes are slightly higher, and the agents potentially more nihilistic. On that, I'm just about done with the old story beat of 'humanity is capable of such great things, to laugh, to love, to dream, etc.' When will a film like this just accept that we're planetary fuck-ups and leave the Celestials to their obliterating whims? Only a thought.

Robb Stark comes across very Ozymandias from Watchmen, by way of Cyclops from the X-Men. Meanwhile, Jon Snow hides his light under a drippy bushel until the very end, hinting at a IP to get his Longclaw into. The powers of this crew are oddly mismatched. Lauren Ridloff's Makkari is super fast, Thena is great with her magic blades, and Gilgamesh (Dong-seok) has a massive smashy fist, but Druig (Keoghan) can only do mind control and Bryan Tyree Henry is good at making stuff. Not the best in a scrap, though they make do in concert with one another, and I guess that's the point.

About halfway through, we see one of these lovely brawls, this one in the Amazon jungle, between Deviants and Eternals, where the later marginalised monsters show some odd behaviour. They now seem to be draining the powers from our heroes. Anyway, this thread is pretty much abandoned when the bigger fish need frying. That Celestial fish, once filleted, is only the start of the trouble for the Eternals, but these issues will likely get ironed out sometime during the coming phase. The MCU will outlive us all.

See also:

There are echoes of Ridley Scott's Prometheus (2012) in the whole 'ancient off-worlders designing our fate/future' thing, and it looks like Highlander is getting a reboot soon, so let's revisit the 1986 original, directed by Aussie Russell Mulcahy. With my sword and head held high, got to pass the test first time...