Ramin Djawadi music... Kit Harrington and Richard Madden... A character named Cersei (well, Sersi if you must)... For a moment I thought I'd tuned into Game Of Thrones.

If Game Of Thrones was total bollocks.

This is what happens if you simultaneously take your fantasy too seriously and not seriously enough.

This is what happens when you hire someone to helm your multi-million dollar, multi-character, CGI-heavy comicbook exposition-dump whose previous experience largely involved filming a lady taking an actual dump in a bucket. I do feel sorry for the talented Chloé Zhao because Nomadland is clearly a more exciting superhero movie than Eternals. A lot less 'woke' to boot. I hate that term and am all for diversity but this really took it to a whole new level of cringe.

Basically this is what happens when a company's hubris gets the better of them and they get sloppy.

What else is wrong with this picture? Umm, more or less everything. Let's find out, shall we...

It didn't help that I rewatched Dune the other day but even so, the visual FX here are truly shocking for a $200m 2021 movie. How ILM and Weta combined forces to deliver late 90s levels of digital, erm... 'composting' is beyond me. Mortal Enemas and Valerian And The Shitty Pile Of Big Old Rectums may have been pretty dreadful but at least they looked pretty.

Also, news just in...

The characters are unappealing, the story uninvolving, the costumes ridiculous, the script amateurish and the whole endeavour feels more like a typically shattershot DC misfire than anything resembling the previously bulletproof MCU formula. I now have less of a dim view of Thor: The Dark World that's for sure.

Eternals was the first MCU product I bypassed at the cinema in quite some while. This was partly due to being burned out on comicbooky stuff and partly due to it looking fairly rubbish from the trailers. They pretty much showed the 'best' bits, so yep, I dodged a bullet all right. After the horrendous WandaVision, I swore off small-screen Marvel ventures and after this one I'm currently re-evaluating 2022's cinematic superhero timeline. One thing's for sure, many more of these kind of slapdash, audience-insulters and the 'Marvel-ous' House Of Mouse's 'Evil Empire' will begin to crumble. At least for me. They've had a good run but nothing is ETERNAL, after all... Ho-ho.