[MCU Explainer, Analysis & Review] Eternals [Impressions & Easter Eggs]
This time I’m going to write about the points worth flagging in the latest MCU film Eternals, plus the explainers, the analysis, the Easter eggs and predictions for where all of this goes next. I’ll be digging into how Thanos, Eros (Starfox) and the Eternals connect, and breaking down the Celestials and the Black Knight especially!
Spoilers ahead
The What If…? episode reviews from back when it was airing — check the image below!
Contents
Overall verdict
It holds together really well
First film the Eternals have ever had, and the scale of the Eternals and the Celestials is enormous, so I was worried — but they pulled that complicated, huge-scale story together beautifully!! And the action for each hero looked great! The Celestials’ visual design was seriously cool too!
It got me properly attached to every one of the characters as well, and Gilgamesh dying, and Ikaris and Sprite turning traitor, caught me off guard! And Ikaris flying into the sun at the end, exactly the way the legend goes — epic in the literal sense, and I loved it.
Differences from the comics
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-e5VVZQ38yU
I watched the video above to see what the Eternals get up to in the comics, and apparently in the comics too they are beings made for the sake of humans. Some of them despaired at that and fell out with each other inside the group, some took their own lives, and in the end it seems every one of them died. But the Eternals are immortal, so apparently they were reborn and came back. Which means the MCU could well do what the comics did and bring the dead Eternals back.
The threat of the Celestials
At the end of the film the Celestial Arishem declares that he will pass judgement on whether humanity is wiped out or allowed to survive, and carries the surviving Eternals away. Do they get their memories taken as well? That part worries me.
The Celestials’ next judgement looks like it’ll be the big all-heroes-assemble story that follows on from Kang.
The MCU scaling up
The Celestials head off somewhere far away, Makkari, Druig and Thena go out into space to tell the other Eternals the truth, and the rest of the surviving members get carried off by Arishem, as above.
So the MCU’s balance of power ends up unchanged, and I thought that was a pretty good way to close it out. Presumably they come back once the heroes outside the Eternals have grown in number and got stronger.
Theories / Easter eggs
The Celestials
In the comics
The MCU calls them Celestials
A giant humanoid cosmic race shrouded in mystery (whether the concept of a “race” even applies to them is unclear to begin with). They are the size of a small mountain. Individuals vary a great deal, but they are said to stand over 600 metres tall, which makes them bigger than Galactus. To give a sense of it: Knowhere, the place shaped like a colossal human head, is in fact the remains of a Celestial’s head, and people and others came to live inside it. They descend to Earth from space wearing armour, though what the armour is for is also unknown. According to Nathaniel Richards (the father of Reed Richards, otherwise known as Mister Fantastic), the armour is what the Celestials need in order to exist in this dimension. They appear to interfere with the evolution of intelligent species, and are known to have created the Eternals and the Deviants out of humans.
https://w.atwiki.jp/studentx/pages/1107.html
Basically the setup is the same in the comics and in the MCU. And that concept, that design — classic Jack Kirby! So cool!
In the MCU
On film they turned up in the first Guardians of the Galaxy as well.
There’s also the corpse of a Celestial that ended up as Knowhere, the place from the first Guardians of the Galaxy.
And Quill’s father Ego, from the second Guardians of the Galaxy, was a Celestial too.
Visually he’s different from the Celestials in Eternals, but it’d be nice to get an explanation for all that later on!
As for the Celestials in this film, it seems the red one called Arishem is their leader. Their life cycle: once every billion years, one is born on a planet with plenty of intelligent life, and the planet is destroyed in the process, so of course everything living on it is wiped out.
The Celestials apparently create galaxies as well, and seem to govern the cycle of the universe too. In the film Ikaris takes the view that for the sake of that cosmic cycle, even a mass slaughter can’t be helped.
Tiamut
The Celestial that was about to be born on Earth was called Tiamut.
Sersi turned him into marble? and he died… My grasp of this is shaky, but the film did say that Tiamut gave the Eternals their power as well, didn’t it. So he was actually a really good guy…?
The Eternals
In the comics
A race created a million years ago by the Celestials, who came to Earth and ran genetic experiments on early hominids. The Deviants and humanity were created at the same time. Their scientific name is “Homo immortalis”. They have immortal bodies and can manipulate cosmic power. Many of them carry names and natures close to the gods of mythology, and humans have often mistaken them for exactly that. Within the solar system, besides the Eternals of Earth, there are Eternals on Uranus and on Titan, and Thanos and Starfox are Eternals of Titan. Eternals also exist among the Kree and elsewhere.
https://w.atwiki.jp/studentx/pages/977.html
In the comics Thanos is a descendant of theirs too, apparently. I’ll go into that later in this post.
Teams like this have come along before, so I’m curious to see how Marvel sets them apart.
In the MCU
Turns out the Eternals aren’t an immortal race from Olympia at all — they’re androids the Celestials built…!! The purpose they were built for was hunting the Deviants, who had evolved to the point of preying on intelligent life. And because evolving would make the Eternals impossible to control, they were built as androids that don’t evolve.
Though it seems that, like Sprite, they can also become human through the power of the Uni-Mind.
The Uni-Mind
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ycjPneFw16w
In the comics the Uni-Mind is apparently used to become a being of pure energy in order to study other beings, and to save others.
In the MCU it looks more like generating a colossal amount of energy? Something along those lines.
The Deviants
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DFAclOmIiTw
A race created a million years ago when the Celestials manipulated the genes of early hominids. Their scientific name is “Homo descendus”. Their genes are unstable and their forms mutate over and over, which leaves them looking monstrous. That is why they are held to be the origin of the legends of demons. They once enslaved humanity, based themselves on the continent of Lemuria and ruled almost the whole of the Earth apart from Atlantis. They lost the war against the Celestials, though, and Lemuria fell. Since then they have been hiding deep underground.
https://w.atwiki.jp/studentx/pages/976.html
In the comics the Deviants are an intelligent race, but a human-based monster with unstable genes is a difficult thing to build a story on by today’s standards, isn’t it.
In the MCU the Celestials created them so that intelligent life would increase, as creatures that prey on the predators that hunt intelligent life. But the Celestials miscalculated one thing, and that was that the Deviants evolve. As a result the evolution put them beyond control, and that’s why the Celestials made the Eternals. A really nice rearrangement of the comics setup!
How Thanos and the Eternals are connected
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b5KYLw1jGgg
In the comics Thanos’s grandfather Kronos is an Eternal, and his son Mentor is an Eternal as well, apparently. And Mentor was blessed with two sons, Thanos and Eros (Starfox). But Thanos had Deviant Syndrome, an illness that leaves the appearance disfigured.
Which is why Thanos has purple skin and Starfox looks human.
Children for the Eternals?
The Eternals are something like androids, so whether they can reproduce at all is questionable. But Eros (Starfox) turning up here surely locks in that Thanos and his family are of Eternal lineage. And Starfox’s outfit was pure Eternals on top of that.
So how did they have children? The Quantum Bands, the same as in the comics? Or do they stop being Eternals through the Uni-Mind?
Where Eternals sits on the timeline
As the film itself makes clear, this is set after Endgame.
Going by other news sites online, it’s apparently almost the same point as Spider-Man: No Way Home (NWH).
The MCU world looks like it could change a great deal before and after Tiamut’s body appears. Maybe new technology comes out of Tiamut’s corpse…
And then the mid-credits scene brings…
Thanos’s younger brother Eros
Thanos’s younger brother Eros (Starfox) shows up!!!
His setup in the comics is below.
The son of Mentor (A’lars), an Eternal originally from Earth, and Sui-San, an Eternal of Titan, the moon of Saturn, and the younger brother of Thanos. A hero who has been a member of the Avengers. His original name was Eron, but he was renamed Eros because at the age of five he was already interested in the opposite sex. Unlike his brother he is free-spirited, a hedonist and a womaniser. Their outlooks differ, but he holds no hatred toward his brother and no desire to kill him.
If anything, he is the one relative who keeps up some sort of family relationship with Thanos of all people. He lost his mother when Thanos attacked Titan, and fought Thanos alongside the first Captain Marvel, who would later become his close friend. He left Titan after that and wandered from place to place, but when Captain Marvel was dying of cancer he returned to Titan, and was entrusted with looking after Marvel’s lover Elysius, an artificial Eternal, and their son Genis-Vell. But his drifter nature meant he couldn’t bear it for long, and once Elysius picked up on that he set out travelling again with her blessing. He had Titan’s supercomputer ISAAC run the calculations, Earth came out as the place best suited to adventure, so he went there and joined the Avengers. Operating on Earth under his real name “Eros” would cause all sorts of problems, so the Wasp (Janet) gave him the code name “Starfox”.
https://w.atwiki.jp/studentx/pages/1449.html
Only a couple of minutes of screen time, but the personality and the rest of it feel just like the comics.
His power is charming people, the same as in the comics, presumably? Really looking forward to how he gets involved from here!
The post-credits scene
Black Knight
Sersi’s partner Dane Whitman looks like he’s going to become the Black Knight, exactly as in the comics!!
MCU Phase 4 keeps adding all sorts of heroes out of Marvel Comics and it’s wonderful! The world is expanding at a ridiculous speed lol lol
In the comics there have apparently been three Black Knights.
The first is in the first video below, and the second, as the second video shows, was apparently a villain. And the third took the mantle over from the second, who was his uncle. But the third is a proper hero, it seems!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cHFjFPkSfRc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ves-PuulQs4
Going by Eternals itself, Dane doesn’t seem to be on good terms with his uncle. Line that up with the comics setup and it looks like the uncle is the second Black Knight and a bad man, while Dane goes on from here as the third Black Knight and a hero! Whether that plays out in a film, or in a Disney+ show like Moon Knight, is worth watching for as well!
Where this goes next
Galactus
The Celestials have shown up, so of course I want Galactus to turn up as well!
A devourer of planets, also known as “Galactus the Devourer”. He moves through the universe without pause, absorbing the energy of planets to satisfy his hunger. To a planet he sets his sights on he is a cosmic-scale catastrophe, and there is nothing to be done about it. What he actually is, is a giant clad in armour — said to be a survivor of the universe from before the Big Bang, a being older than time itself. The planets he attacks are destroyed, but he is held to be beyond good and evil, and necessary for keeping the balance of the universe.
https://w.atwiki.jp/studentx/pages/346.html
So Galactus is a predator that keeps the balance of the universe.
How to deal with the Celestials as their numbers grow, what to do about the cycle — that looks like it could become one of the MCU’s themes.
Thanos’s real goal
I think anyone who has watched Eternals through to the end will have picked up on this, but Thanos’s snap was indirectly preventing the birth of a Celestial.
Given that Thanos presumably has Eternal blood in him, maybe the snap had a second purpose all along, and that purpose was stopping the Celestials.
