Rating summary

Movie		2.0
Video		4.5
Audio		3.5
Extras		2.5
Overall		3.0

Eternals 4K Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Martin Liebman February 3, 2022

Director Chloé Zhao has accomplished the impossible: she has crafted a lifeless Marvel movie. The film is as overlong and tedious a watch as life must be for the Eternals themselves, created beings who have lived on Earth for centuries and who have become scattered and bereft of purpose until an old enemy surfaces and truths emerge to bring them back together and...yada, yada, yada. The film seems happy to simply build from the Marvel playbook but forgets that it's not just a formula that makes these movies work. It's not just that dazzling chorography and tuned cinematography, not simply a grand score and an assortment of superpowered heroes that make an MCU movie great. While it offers character sprawl and powers aplenty, the film lacks what makes most of the others thrive: a beating heart. Eternals is a cold, soulless experience that never achieves more than overpromising and underdelivering on every main front: story, characters, and action.

This is a shockingly flat, lifeless film, bereft of anything memorable and populated by underwhelming characters who are not poorly developed or performed but who together have little chemistry within an unfocused script. Action is hard to come by. Certainly, Marvel has proven that action, while integral to the core experience, can take a backseat to characterization, true even amongst and especially important for, the core mainline characters, but the slow pace is killer for this gaggle of individuals who are collectively an interesting bunch but individually little more than the sum of their meager one sentence descriptions. They are paper thin, each of them reduced to a talent and, if they are lucky, a tangible relationship or interesting power. Mostly, the roster is merely a jumble of individuals who look different but all feel cut from the same cloth, which is a series of rejected templates for characters who eventually became someone more interesting.

At over 2.5 hours the film is a labor to sit through; where Marvel movies like Avengers: Endgame can clock in at three hours and feel like three minutes, Eternals is every bit the rear-numbing experience its floundering merits suggest. Its problems are many: the story is not overwrought but rather underwhelmingly revealing for what is very interesting material (more on that in a moment). The characters are hopelessly bland and not in the least bit dynamic. Performances are not great, but neither do they struggle; the actors simply cannot find a dynamic that isn't there. The film's technical structure lacks originality too; it's so ardently adhered to Marvel stylings that it cannot, visually, find its own identity.

While it is true that this review reads like it’s piling on there is an upshot: there’s a truly fantastic core in place, so brimming with potential that one could envision some reworks that would instantly rise Eternals into the stratosphere of the best Marvel films rather than one situated at its lowest. One can find both deeply secluded and superficially overt religious symbolism and commentary about the nature of the universe, the order of things, origins and destiny, and one’s place and purpose in it all. Unfortunately, the film only ever touches on this content in deep and profound ways, and considering that the film flows at a sloth like pace it’s only all the more destructive to teeter on the edge of something special and constantly fail to achieve full potential.

Eternals 4K Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

The included screenshots are sourced from a 1080p Blu-ray disc.

Disney brings Eternals to the UHD format with a standard issue 2160p/HDR presentation. The picture is more of a standard transition to the format rather than a transformation from the concurrently released Blu-ray. The HDR color grading certainly renders the movie appearing darker, darker in even brighter exteriors and well-lit interiors and far darker in low light interiors. See the 1:52:00 mark for an example where the UHD appears so much darker that, compared to the Blu-ray, almost all of the background is absorbed and Sersi's black hair almost blends into the darkness. If anything, the deeper contrast and adjusted brightness give the movie a moodier, slightly more cinematic appeal and a narratively darker tone. The HDR grading does allow for more tonal nuance and vibrancy. Various digital color adds -- the various powers the characters wield -- enjoy more intense luminance and output balance, all the while appearing deeper and more vivid as well. A scene to follow the one referenced above at the 1:55:00 mark transforms from a mildly cloudy day with gray skies on Blu-ray to an imminently stormy sky, devoid of only the faintest daylight, with the costume colors deeper to be sure but lacking the visible detail in the lighter Blu-ray. Which one any given audience member prefers will be up to that individual.

The adds to sharpness and detail are there, but not really all that dramatic. This UHD offers the usual stable of basic upgrades: improved sharpness, more overall clarity, finer attention to individual detail, and the like. Audiences will enjoy superior costume and facial clarity, assuming the picture is not so dark as to render the upgrades nearly unobservable. Regardless of how dark it might look, there is no mistaking the improvements to clarity and definition at close- and medium-distance. The UHD is free of any troubling source issues and encode artifacts.

Eternals 4K Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

The Dolby Atmos soundtrack is similar to the Blu-ray's 7.1 configuration in terms of clarity, engagement, and subwoofer usage: the first excellent, the second large, the third middling. The track suffers the same fate in terms of subwoofer output. While this one is not quite so bass absent as the worst offenders, there is certainly some limit to low end depth, a shame given the opportunities several scenes -- and the final action sequence in particular -- present to the track and the listener. Still, even with only workable, rather than workload, bass, the net effect for the full track is decent enough, with pinpoint surround content and sprawling spacing of the chaotic sonic content. There are plenty of examples of discrete and motion audio cues alike. Musical spacing and definition thrive as well, and atmospheric effects are finely integrated into the total experience. Dialogue is clear and precise from its natural front-center location.

Eternals 4K Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

Eternals incudes several extras, including an audio commentary track, two featurettes, a gag reel, and deleted scenes on the bundled Blu-ray. A Movies Anywhere digital copy code is included with purchase.

• Immortalized (1080p, 10:45): Exploring the film's scope, characters, the original comics, shooting locations, production design, and more.
• Walks of Life (1080p, 5:01): A quick look at the cast and characters.
• Gag Reel (1080p. 2:29): humorous moments from the shoot.
• Deleted Scenes (1080p, 5:49 total runtime): Included are Gravity, Nostalgia, Movies, and Small Talk.
• Audio Commentary: Director Chloé Zhao, Production Visual Effects Supervisor Stephane Ceretti, and Additional Visual Effects Supervisor Mårten Larsson discuss the film with a technical bend.

Eternals 4K Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

With Eternals there was clearly some hope, and opportunity, to build something different: a carefully crafted character expose that takes the time to dig into the essences of the individual characters and the collective alike, looking at personal and group purpose and the induvial dynamics that both pull them together and draw them apart, all the while making various comments on the world around them. Sadly, none of this is realized to full potential. The movie is overlong, too, with middling performances stuck at the script's limits. Action is hard to come by through much of the movie, too, and the film is stylistically hard up to find its own identity. Disney's UHD does look good, though it's very dark. It sounds decent and there's a fair smattering of extras. Worth a look.