Marvel’s ‘Eternals’ May Be Your Woke Nightmare, But It’s My Kind of Science Fiction Fantasy Epic

And I’m usually just a lukewarm Marvel viewer.

Image Credit: Marvel Studios

Rumor on the streets goes that Marvel superfans are on the warpath, using sites like Rotten Tomatoes to flood the new film Eternals with bad reviews during its opening weekend.

Let’s be clear: I’m not a Marvel superfan. My favorite Marvel property is Wandavision (which I watched twice). I have seen large chunks of the “Infinity Saga” that took place over 23 films, but I still haven’t found myself intrigued enough to watch The Falcon and the Winter Soldier and Loki. It might just be a fluke that I actually went to the theater to see Black Widow and Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings.

I like Marvel best when it focuses less on being interconnected through its films and just tries to tell me a good story with engaging characters. If I come away from a Marvel film or show and think, “Damn, I’d really love to write something like that,” then I consider that a gold star for the whole production. Though I find the mid-credits and post-credits scenes tacked onto the ends of almost every film to be cute (and a little gimmicky), I don’t need to see those jumps of trying to bind all these properties together in one giant web of meaning.