“Why didn’t the Eternals intervene when Ultron tried to destroy the world, or when Thanos was about to wipe out half the universe, you ask? Apparently they’re only allowed to take action when the deviants are involved.”

Or why, HE asks, didn’t they step in during the Nazi holocaust to try and save a few million Jews from horrible death? Or during the mass murders of Cambodian citizens in the mid to late ’70? Part of the answer is that the Eternals believe that tragedies are teaching experiences, and that people grow after experiencing them. Apparently they’re only allowed to take action when the deviants are involved.

But really, how worthless are the Eternals in a general sense?

From Owen Gleiberman‘s 11.7 Variety essay, “Why Is Chloé Zhao’s ‘Eternals’ Being Called the Worst MCU Movie Ever?”

“There are certain enemies you can’t compromise with. And though I think the 100-year history of movies — and the future of movies, if they’re going to have a future — hinges on artists embracing the medium’s populist dimension, it’s my sense that the critical establishment today increasingly prefers to see cinema on two separate tracks: the jumbo-size popcorn movies made for a mass audience, and the smaller, more artful movies made…not for a mass audience.

“Chloé Zhao doing a Marvel movie, and subjugating a lot of her directorial personality to it, threatens that dichotomy. If she’s trying to work — not just literally but aesthetically ­– within the power structure, then she’s not fighting the power. And I think she’s being punished for that. The people whose opinions add up to Eternals being the “worst Marvel movie ever” don’t want to see Chloe Zhao make a conventional Marvel movie. They don’t want to see her win a battle and lose the war. They’d rather prove a point by making her a casualty of that war.”