ETERNALS

CONTAINS SOME SPOILERS. AGAIN.

Again, again, again. Are there not enough of these yet? Have we not reached the saturation point? Even more superheroes, even more superpowers, even more supermonsters to be ripped into a billion pixels in an orgasmic frenzy of CGI whizzbang. Sometimes it feels as if this is all cinema is interested in these days. This is the latest addition to the roster of squarejaws in skintights: the Eternals, another team of magically endowed Human Plus warriors who are absolutely not the Avengers (despite them getting a mention here and there) but who are apparently hoping to at least get into the third-place playoffs along with the Justice League, the X-Men and Paw Patrol.

Thousands of years ago a squad of immortal warriors was despatched to Earth to combat an outbreak of soul-sucking space monsters known as Deviants, and then to hang around for eternity in case they were ever required again; otherwise, like Time Lords, they were not to interfere in humanity's often bloody progress. Now, having either blended into society with a string of false identities or hidden away in the remotest corners of the world, they are compelled to break cover and get back together as Deviants resurface and rampage through, er, Camden. Inevitably the team gets split by internal division just before the massive final confrontation with the Great Emergence...

As you'd imagine, their superpowers vary, from Superspeed to Superstrength and Superflying (the last also including firing laser beams from his eyes), so not remotely like The Flash and The Hulk and Superman then. This is the trouble with Eternals: the names and actors might be different but we really have been down this road many times already. There's a shapeshifter (who isn't Mystique) and one who does tricks with metal bracelets but isn't really Shang-Chi (which only came out a few months ago, for goodness' sake). Maybe it would have been better if they'd dropped a few of them instead of trying to cram in quite so many new characters at once (at least with Justice League we'd heard of some of them already outside the Inner Circles of Comicbook Nerdery), and this would also have allowed them to trim the running time down from an unwieldy 157 minutes.

It's not all bad by any means: it's visually arresting sometimes and the CG is perfectly well rendered though it strays into overkill on several occasions: it's just too much for the eye to take in to the extent that they might as well just do it as a cartoon. It's also a lot less fun than the average Marvel shenanigans: weirdly it feels more like their attempt to make a DC film, like it's Zack Snyder's X-Men or something (though it is nowhere near as dull as his spandex thudfests); there's much less snarky comedy to be had except for Kumail Nanjiani's Bollywood star (for four generations) and instead has extended scenes of indestructible, invincible superheroes pounding the daylights out of each other, which isn't anywhere near as interesting as it should be.

So it's kind of an unenthusiastic "meh, it's okay", but again that's really not enough for a film with this high a budget (reportedly $200,000,000 before marketing, which is frankly an obscene amount of money). The film ends with two extra sequences mid- and post-credits teasing new instalments and a closing caption "The Eternals Will Return", just in case you were in any doubt that these things are going to go on and on and on until the audience just gets fed up of them and gives up, or until the world ends. My money's on the latter, and clearly so is Marvel's. I just wish Eternals had showed me something genuinely arresting, or was at least a lot more fun. Instead I'm just lukewarm about it, very much in the middle. It's fine but that's all.

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