Eternals vs GotG 2

So I watched and was disappointed by the Eternals and to be quite honest all I was thinking about through a good portion of that movie was “Guardians of the galaxy did this so much better” because like it or not we’ve already been introduced to the concept of eternals and we’ve already seen a family like dynamic when they all have different motivations and moral compasses. We’ve already seen relationships within a family like a unit develop and play out and we’ve seen it sone so much better then the underdeveloped mess that the eternals gave us.

The Eternals tried to give us family, a love triangle, and a love story. It simply tried to do too much. They attempted to give you the family connection through flashback, which in my opinion was the first mistake. Flashbacks aren't necessary to establish history or emotion, in fact I think the writers that rely on flashbacks as a means to tell a story and not strictly for character development are lazy, uncreative and quite frankly bad at their jobs. If you need to spend an hour of your 2 and a half hour movie in the past to try and establish connections between your characters, then you are focusing on the wrong things.

Guardians established a fatherly and familial relationship between Peter and Ego and Peter and Yondu immediately WITHOUT having to walk us back over and over again to tell us why Peter needed/wanted a father figure. Guardians developed NEbula and Gamora’s sisterly rivalry without the need to explicitly state their animosity towards each other, we saw them love each other and fight against each other and their upbringing. We see the love between Gamora and Peter develop without the intensive outline and backstory.

The biggest reason that these two movies are of such intently different quality is because of pacing and structure, Guardians has a very clear and distinct 3 act structure, that structure is supported by great pacing and development of both the plot and characters. Eternals had absolutely no structure whatsoever and it's pacing was so painfully slow that for a majority of that movie, nothing really happened. It was a good hour and a half of build with no payoff or just unbearable filler.

A good, solid secondary reason these 2 movies are so vastly different is because of commitment to the type of story it wants to tell. I mentioned in my Eternals review that stories are either character driven or plot driven and Eternals didn’t seem to know which one it wanted to be, it seemed to so desperately want to be character driven but it simply didn’t have the time to develop all the characters and relationships as they chose too many characters, whereas guardians is very clearly character driven and that is what makes it so brilliant.

And that brings us to the real reason I decided to compare these 2 films; We’ve already seen Celestials. Guardians of the Galaxy 2 already gave us how Celestials develop, what they can do and how they can live.

1) They develop on their own, they do not need “intelligent life” to develop, retcons happen a lot in the comics because there are thousands of them that span decades. You don’t get to retcon the MCU canon, these beings have already been established and Eternals craps on all of that.

2) Celestials literally are planets, they are not housed in planets. They don’t develop from the inside of existing planetary bodies.

3) If Mantis can put Ego to sleep, no matter how temporary there is absolutely zero reason that an Eternal that is connected to the power of the other Eternals can’t put a non-emerged celestial to sleep. That entire plot point was uselessly concocted in an attempt to make Circe more important then she actually is but again it shot established canon in the foot.

The Eternals was bad for many technical reasons but what made it a useless addition to the MCU was it's absolutely ridiculous disregard of established canon.