Eternals

Eternals

Here's my review of the first 3 seconds:
1) Mesopotamia is lush and forested, not a desert.
2) Mesopotamia is a river delta, not a cliff. How do you build the first farms on cliff?
3) Mesopotamia didn't exist in 5,000 BC. The Persian Gulf was not underwater then, and the Sumerians were under modern day Oman.
4) Why are the Sumerians speaking Turkish?
5) The Eternals came on their domino. It's just funny.

Finally, there's a good explanation for why the Eternals didn't previously intervene, because war causes overpopulation. Yeah, 6 million European Jews is a little too much. The Chinese can have their 1.4 billion though.

So brave, so bold, truly Choloe Zhao making a thoughtful, philosophical Terrence Malick film.

To be honest, she was probably asleep when she made this generic, horribly pased, horribly acted, campy, unintentionally hilarious masterpiece.

Here's a paragraph you can imagine dedicated to Selma Hayek's acting. It makes Gal Gadot singing "Imagine" want to run for her money.

Why is there zero chemistry between romantic leads, and then a cut into a sex scene? Because Chloe Zhao probably got some Pakistani boy to write it for her $10 whilst she collected the profits. Or she, quite wealthy and capable of producing her own films, sold her soul to Disney after literally winning best picture. Now it all makes sense - her life is as terribly written as this film! She's writing what she knows.

I stopped the film at 10 minutes, and said, "that's enough."

Then I started it again a couple of days later. The promise of this calamity was too tempting to ignore it seems.

This makes wanda vision look like Seven Samurai. The CGI too, it's so ugly Hard to Be a God looks like a Terence Mallick Film.

The film can't be emotion when we haven't built a connection to the characters!

Now, only the second historical flashback...
Why are there mud huts in front of a Babylonian royal road? Why are Babylonians speaking arabic? Also, the "largest city on earth" Babylon is the size of a block.

Also, I love the fact that the Eternals want to introduce a steam engine 2 thousands years after the Greeks already invented their version. Also, they want to literally introduce a plough after farming with a plough has existed for over 7 thousand years.

Also, they want to introduce a myth based on an actual flood thousands of years after it was already in the culture? A myth literally transcribed in a language that was already extinct at this point. How could you be this dumb?!

Why would you make a deaf Eternal, a literal robot designed for battle that has a literal, crucial sense missing? Why would you give your genocide machines emotion?

And then the Tenochtitlan/Mexico City battle. The Eternals do not intervene in the moment that caused the genocide and loss of 3/4 of the world's cultures and languages. Not only that, but they display the Spanish conquest as not a civil war between the Aztecs, where the Spanish backed a side which they later betrayed and then took the upper hand, but as a spanish vs Aztec battle. The Aztecs are portrayed as pathetic - when in fact they held out for 93 days, betrayed by all their allies, stricken by smallpox, having understood the Spanish way of fighting so intricately they forced them onto the street environment. But all of a sudden, this Venice of the New world is a giant field.

But ... stone falls on the girl's head. Eternal intervenes.

Also the Spanish have no formation, and the Aztecs are running away like chickens, when they were literally breaking down their temples into bricks they could throw at the Spanish, Tlaxcalans and other Mexican native nations attacking them.

It was not a "genocide," as this film claims. Literally 5% of the Mexican gene pool is Spanish. The Aztecs were merely enslaved, won their territory back in a war of independence, wanted a European identity so they erased their language despite 80% still speaking indigenous languages in 1830, and are still here - and even more, in the USA, far outside their original territory, numbering in the hundreds of millions.

Ok so now we're back to present day…. where Bollywood is in English?

And then, the plot is explained. The Eternals fight the human killing deviants to allow the population to grow large enough for the planet to become a celestial. But genocide is fine again, right?

Deviant attacks a street. Eternals save 6 people.
20 million die in WWII.
Net gain. Director Chloe Zhao is a mathematical genius.

I also agree that 66,000 dead in Hiroshima - to end a war against an empire more bloodthirsty and brutal than the Nazis - is definitely the worst thing that has ever happened. Not Mao's killing of 40 million at around the same time.

Anyway, 'Eternals' dumb. I just want to add that the distrangly ridiculous level of diversity makes 'Eternals' feel more like a checklist than a film.

First film I've reviewed this year. Hopefully it's a good omen.

History's important - it's who we are, where we come from, and what we're destined to achieve. It's the greatest story ever told. Respect it, especially if you claim to.

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Caius liked this review