Eternals Tests the Faith of Its Heroes, Audience, and Marvel

[Editor’s Note: This article contains spoilers for Eternals.]

Eternals is a movie about characters trying to kill God. There’s other stuff going on as well about love, family, devotion, and human civilization, but the core conflict is about God’s creations going against the will of their creator, and the final fight is between those who have chosen to exercise their free will and those who believe that the creator’s will must be served no matter the cost. This notion about the limits of faith applies not only to the plot of Eternals, but also to Marvel fans and the studio itself. Eternals tests everyone, and sadly, everyone comes up short.

For those that need a brief plot recap, Sersi (Gemma Chan), who takes over the communication orb from Ajak (Selma Hayek) after her death, learns from the Celestial (and effectively their God), Arishem, that they are not protectors of humanity, but simply tending to the human population to make sure it isn’t decimated by Deviants. Celestials need the human population to grow because they seed planets with new Celestials. When a Celestial emerges, it destroys the planet, but the energy they create forms billions of new lives. From a utilitarian standpoint, Celestials kill tens of billions so they can give life to hundreds of billions. However, most of the Eternals—who learn they are synthetic beings, not inhabitants of a world called Olympia as they had been led to believe—decide to rebel and stop the emergence of a new Celestial. This puts them in conflict with Ikaris (Richard Madden), who knew the truth and whose faith in Arishem had him determined to stop his fellow Eternals even if it meant killing them. Ikaris stops short of his resolve when his love for Sersi prevents him from stopping her. The Eternals stop the rise of Earth’s Celestial and Ikaris, unable to live with his decisions, dies by flying into the sun.

eternals-richard-madden — Image via Marvel

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Ikaris is one of Marvel’s more interesting villains because he’s driven by faith rather than a quest for power. His decision isn’t because he hates the Eternals or hates humanity or feels personally wronged, but because he has devoted his life to serving Arishem. If your entire identity is based on your adherence to God (and it’s worth noting that while Ajak and later Sersi communicate directly with this God, Ikaris doesn’t, so his beliefs are based on faith rather than serving a God that has spoken to him directly), then Eternals examines how far you will go based on that faith. Would you not only turn your back on your family, but would you also be willing to kill them? Would you let an entire planet of people die if that was your creator’s will? When your life’s purpose derives from faith, how can you turn your back on that?

These are all interesting questions, and yet Eternals never finds a satisfying way of commenting on them because the good guys have to win and continue being good guys in how they win. That means none of the good Eternals can kill Ikaris, Ikaris can’t bring himself to kill Sersi because he loves her (a love that’s rendered in the broadest strokes possible), and then he decides that if he can’t follow Arishem and he can’t live with his fellow Eternals (which would be awkward since he killed Ajak), he just flies into the sun, thus removing any future conflict or thoughtfulness about the limits of his faith. His faith took a backseat to love, so he had to die, not because the film creates a compelling reason for it, but because he has to “pay” for killing Ajak and betraying his family. His death doesn’t relate to his faith as much as it serves the basic morality of a superhero movie.

Eternals poorly serves all of its themes because the film is simply too crowded for the story it’s trying to tell. It’s not too surprising that the film has earned negative feedback from critics. Given the success of the franchise and the pedigree of its Oscar-winning director, high expectations were only fair for this latest installment of the MCU. But because the film doesn’t hold together, it has received a tougher verdict from critics than recent Marvel movies like Black Widow and Shang-Chi and the Ten Rings, which aren’t as ambitious as Eternals, but also are fairly comfortable in what they’re attempting to do, a comfort that Eternals never finds.

The Cast of The Eternals — Image via Marvel Studios

And yet because Rotten Tomatoes scores are now taken as some objective metric of quality rather than a flawed appraisal of critical opinion, some Marvel fans have taken this as an attack on their faith. They believed that the studio, which has delivered over ten years of solid entertainment, will always entertain. Fandom is tied to identity, and if “thing is bad”, that would mean that being a fan is bad, therefore identity is bad, and that cannot hold. Thus, some fans (and #NotAllMarvelFans; it’s a big fanbase, and just because it has some loud members, that doesn’t mean they represent the thinking of everyone who likes Marvel movies), have questioned the merit of the RT score because it doesn’t support their faith. Eternals must be good, therefore the critics are “wrong” (even though, again, this is all subjective—you can’t be right or wrong about whether you like a movie; you can only strive to make a strong argument about why you believe what you do).

But Marvel is not God. They’re a studio and a subsidiary of The Walt Disney Company, and sometimes studios make movies that, for one reason or another, don’t connect with particular audiences. That doesn’t mean that critics are wrong or had it out for Marvel or that they don’t appreciate diversity or they set the bar too high or that they’re harder on the movie because it’s directed by a woman or any other argument that that tries to believe that critics have some kind of groupthink agenda rather than a bunch of individuals simply saw similar issues with the same movie.

The larger issue isn’t that Eternals earned a “rotten” score, but that the movie itself showed the limits of how far Marvel was willing to take its story. Again, this is a movie where the good guys rebel against their creator, but when you’re making a superhero movie for a mass audience, there are some lines that a Hollywood studio isn’t going to cross. Marvel doesn’t want to be controversial; they want to be popular because when they’re popular they sell more stuff and Disney makes more money which makes their shareholders happy. Marvel couldn’t make a movie where the heroes say, “It’s time to kill Arishem, our creator and all who follow him.” That’s not a popular metaphor! So instead Eternals hedges where Arishem lives another day and gets to judge the Eternals for their heresy, thus being a fair God who respects the choices of his creations rather than a wrathful God who punishes them for breaking the faith. His most devoted follower, Ikaris, decides to self-immolate, and that’s the end of the conversation.

Eternals can’t be more interesting than that because Marvel movies aren’t designed to challenge their audience; they’re designed to thrill them. And that’s fine! There’s room for those kinds of movies in the landscape, and they’re popular for a reason. But Eternals shows the limits of how much a Marvel movie can give its audience. It can’t really be an exploration of faith, zealotry, and heresy because that would threaten to make the audience uncomfortable, and that’s not the business that these studios are in. They have faith in their audience to sit for a story about magical space aliens and stones that can dust half of all sentient life. They have less faith about the audience being happy about superheroes that seek to defy the will of their creator and wrestle with what it means to have your faith shattered. That’s a great story, but no one should have faith in a superhero studio being able to tell it.

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