Rating summary

Movie		2.0
Video		4.5
Audio		3.5
Extras		2.5
Overall		3.0

Eternals 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 Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Disney's 1080p Bu-ray presentation of Eternals checks all the right boxes. The image is clean, clear, and colorful (at least insofar as the content allows). The movie looks great on this format, reaching what looks like near peak efficiency for textural output and overall image sharpness. Faces, of course, reveal commanding depth and detail while various costumes, landscapes, and the like offer tack-sharp clarity throughout. Colors are expressive and stable. The film is fairly dark as it is but not so dark, and not so consistently, as to render any color output moot. Instead, even in darkness the sense of tonal fullness and accuracy is in evidence. Skin tones are healthy and black levels are very deep and true. The picture manages noise very well and there are no major encode flaws of note. The picture may not have any characteristics that make it really stand apart from the crowd but in many ways that's perfectly fine. This is about best-case scenario for Eternals on Blu-ray.

Eternals Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Eternals arrives on Blu-ray with a DTS-HD Master Audio 7.1 lossless soundtrack. The presentation is not quite so severely neutered as other Disney tracks, but it is certainly still lacking in the subwoofer department. An earthquake at the 10-minute mark doesn't rumble like there's no tomorrow, but there's at least a tangible, borderline agreeable, level of depth at play. Still, it's nowhere near so potent as it should be, and other would-be deeply aggressive audio elements in various action scenes struggle to find that final gear for low end excellence. At least there's something here, anyway. Like other Disney tracks, everything else is in good working order. Clarity is excellent, musical detail is terrific, and the track is well capable of extending to its furthest reaches along the front and throughout the back as well. Atmosphere is well integrated into the track, and there's always a tangible sense of space and openness about it. Dialogue is clear and center focused, and there's even a mildly bass-y response whenever Celestial Arishem speaks.

Eternals Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

Eternals incudes several extras, including an audio commentary track, two featurettes, a gag reel, and deleted scenes. A DVD copy of the film and a Movies Anywhere digital copy code are 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 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 Bu-ray does look good. It sounds decent and there's a fair smattering of extras. Worth a look.