Eternals

On the 6th of October 2013 a teenager from Dublin called Wayne gunned down a cat with an MP5 and Irish twitter went into meltdown. The fact the the killing was both fake and on a TV show called Love/Hate was of no consequence. People were roaring for RTE's downfall. They wanted the ISPCA to denounce the broadcaster. The actor who did the deed, they wanted his head on a stick. Oh it was a hell of a controversial way for young Barry Keoghan to burst onto the scene. Eight years later he's making a name for himself again in the MCU's latest installment, Eternals. There's no cats to be seen this time around, only Babylonians, Aztecs and hungry aliens.

The Eternals were a group of powerful beings sent to Earth 7000 years ago to protect the planet and it's inhabitants from alien invaders called Deviants. With the job finally complete they go their separate ways and they've been instructed by a Celestial higher power that they can use their skills to help the advancement of civilisation and to fight invaders from other worlds but that man made conflicts are to be ignored. In the present day an Eternal called Sersi (Gemma Chan) is living a fulfilling life in London when a threat from the past threatens her life and that of those she loves. Ikarus (Richard Madden), a fellow Eternal arrives and they eliminate the threat together but both realise this is only the start of something bigger so set out to get the gang back together one more time to protect the planet they've called home for several millennia.

The reason The Avengers film worked so well back in 2012 was four previous films had led the groundwork for it. We got to know our heroes on their own before they all got lumped together. Not taking the time to build up to a get together was one of the many reasons The Justice League crashed and burned in 2017. By dint of a great cast and some lovely chemistry generated between them Eternals is far better than the latter while falling short of the former. It's a fun watch but by jesus you have to earn it. If you go into it cold you might struggle because there's a lot going on, a lot of people to meet and get to know and an awful lot of exposition to get through. The film is almost at the halfway point before everyone is back together again and honestly, there's so many characters onscreen that some of them are going to get short shrift.

Deep breath.

We've got Ikarus who might as well be Superman, Sersi who has power over matter, Druig (Barry Keoghan) who can control minds, Kingo (Kumail Nanjiani) with his energy beam firing hands, Sprite (Lia Mchugh), a child Eternal with the power to create optical illusions, Phastos (Brian Tyree Henry), a creator and inventor who over 7000 years has helped civilisation with all it's major inventions, Makkari (Lauren Ridloff) who's blessed with super speed and Gilgamesh (Don Lee) who's super strong, Thena (Angelina Jolie) the elite and fearless warrior and finally Ajak (Salma Hayek), the leader of the Eternals, blessed with warmth and a Ghia like love for all the world around her. Some of them take centre stage, some are shunted off screen for well over an hour, Ikarus of course gets a tonne of screentime despite being the most boring of the bunch. Gotta get the handsome white dude closeups for the trailers dontchaknow.

A big deal was made of Makkari as being Marvel's first superhero with a physical disability but she barely makes an impact at all. Phastos is the first gay superhero in the MCU and thankfully he gets rather more screentime as we get to meet his husband and son and see a bit of his backstory too when we realise the toll ignoring human conflict can have on even a superhuman pysche. Imagine watching an atomic bomb going off over Hiroshima and knowing you had the power to stop it and couldn't. It's this internal conflict that gives Eternals an unexpected bit of heft. Barry Keoghan's Druig has the power to control the mind of every person on Earth but isn't allowed to use it. The moment he can't take his orders anymore is a memorable one, a little bit of Irish accented rebellion in the middle of a blazing Tenochtitlan.

The main story is as silly and nonsensical as always and the big CGI set pieces are Marvel 101, nothing you haven't seen before but it's the character interactions and smaller moments that really work. Dinners served with spit beer, Bollywood dancing, basically anything that comes out of Harish Patel's (Kingo's manager) mouth. This is the stuff you'll remember next week when all the laser blasts and alien beasties have faded from memory. It's here that director Chloé Zhao makes her mark. 

Eternals is out now everywhere. In every screen. In every cinema in the world.