Four phases into the Eternals may have bitten off more than it could chew with a whopping 10 major characters.
Critics jumped at the opportunity to describe the film’s 156-minute runtime as “eternal.” There are some well-defined characters contained in this two-and-a-half-hour epic, like Sersi who’s easy to root for and Ikaris who’s easy to hate. But there are many other Eternals characters in need of more development in a future movie or streaming series.
Phastos
Eternals introduced Endgame’s bare-minimum representation of an unnamed gay character, but he’s still barely a cut above Hollywood’s standard blink-and-miss-it gay representation.
There are a couple of brief scenes introducing his family and his relationship with his husband before he’s whisked away to the adventure as a typical Marvel scientist character, providing all the technical exposition that sets up the action.
Kingo
Kingo is easily the funniest character in the movie. He’s the one who feels the most like a traditional Marvel hero with one-liners and relatable foibles. Much like Tony Stark and Stephen Strange, Kingo’s weakness is his arrogance. He’s so vain and self-involved that, instead of laying low like the other Eternals, he spent years in the spotlight as three generations of Bollywood stars.
But it’s never fully explained how he managed to convince the world he was his own father and grandfather without aging a day. Do his Bollywood actor personas have fleeting bouts of stardom followed by decades of Kingo waiting until enough time has ed to convincingly be the previous version’s son?
Gilgamesh
The strongest Eternal, Gilgamesh, needs to be fleshed out as a stronger character. One of his defining traits is his friendship with Thena, but that friendship is barely extrapolated.
Gilgamesh is one of the last Eternals to be recruited for the mission and caught up on recent cosmic events, so he had fewer opportunities to shine than characters like Sersi who featured in the mainline story from the beginning of the movie.
Starfox
Eros, also known as “Starfox,” is the brother of Thanos, played by One Direction frontman-turned-budding movie star Harry Styles. This character needs more fleshing out in a future MCU project.
Granted, he only appears in the mid-credits scene, and Marvel’s credits scenes usually act as teasers for future character development. But all the audience gets about this character is “Thanos’ brother” and “Harry Styles,” which provided plenty of memes and headlines but not a lot of context.
Sprite
Sprite is an Eternal who can project lifelike illusions and has the physical appearance of a 12-year-old kid. She turns out to be so madly in love with Ikaris that she’s willing to sell out the rest of the Eternals and all of humanity in the hopes that he’ll notice her. That rug-pull comes out of the blue and doesn’t gel with anything the character does up to that point.
It’s established that Sprite has a wry detachment from humanity, but she’s not evil. At the end of the movie, she’s set up for an interesting coming-of-age superhero story. A magical being who’s never aged will suddenly be able to grow up. The character has been described as Tinker Bell to Ikaris’ Peter Pan, but really, she’s Peter Pan.
Druig
Druig’s personality is largely defined by being aloof and detached, which the filmmakers used as an excuse not to develop the character. He shares simmering romantic tension with Makkari, but the movie did nothing with it, instead focusing on the bland love triangle between Sersi, Ikaris, and Dane.
He’s apparently frustrated with the other Eternals for refusing to help out in human conflicts, but all Druig does to meddle in human affairs is control the minds of a whole town to do his bidding. The exact same thing got Wanda Maximoff branded a villain in WandaVision.
Arishem
Arishem is the Celestial who created the Eternals and the Deviants. He’s essentially supposed to be the Marvel universe’s answer to God. Taking a sci-fi approach to explaining the search for and existence of God is a thought-provoking premise. But, much like when Star Trek tried it in the movie The Final Frontier, Eternals doesn’t do enough to justify the loftiness of that premise.
Despite being God, Arishem is presented as a typical faceless CGI menace. There are so many unanswered questions about this character. For starters, what was he standing on in outer space? There’s no floor at the bottom of space.
Thena
Angelina Jolie is the biggest star in the movie, but she was given one of the least memorable characters to play. Thena has similar powers to Green Lantern; she can turn cosmic energy into any weapon imaginable. But in the movie, she mostly just uses her power to make spears, essentially a pointy stick, arguably the least imaginative weapon to conjure out of the fabric of space-time. She could be shooting legions of Deviants with an imaginary Gatling gun.
Thena has an established friendship with Gilgamesh that they’ve developed over centuries. But that friendship needs a lot more screen time if it’s going to compete with such beloved MCU friendships as Peter and Ned, Steve and Bucky, and Strange and Wong.
Makkari
The MCU’s first deaf superhero, Makkari, runs at superhuman speeds, so she’s pretty much Marvel’s answer to the Flash. Played by deaf actor Lauren Ridloff, the character was great for representation. But her role sometimes doesn’t make sense in the historical context.
Makkari inexplicably uses ASL, created in 1817, in ancient flashbacks. She uses the sign for “time,” which is based on wristwatches, centuries before the wristwatch was invented. If she introduced ASL to Earth in the MCU’s version of history, that needs to be explored. Her romantic tension with Druig also needs to be explored in more depth.
Dane Whitman
The Black Knight has been teased for the MCU’s future, but he’s just regular Dane Whitman in Eternals. He’s barely a character in this movie. He’s introduced as Sersi’s boyfriend at the beginning, then he’s off-screen for the rest of his appearances, FaceTiming in.
The post-credits scene suggests he’ll become the Black Knight in a future movie – but why wait? The Eternals could’ve used the Black Knight’s help (and the audience could’ve used a hero with more exciting powers) in the final battle.
