This seems super-easy to explain, to me: the Eternals don’t all keep in contact with each other, but they all keep in contact with Ajak. Since she’s their leader, that was probably one of her conditions for letting them all go off on their own (even if they didn’t take time to explicitly state it, in the text): “Don’t go nowhere that I can’t find you.” After Sersi and Ikaris broke up, Ikaris probably told Ajak some variation of, “Look, boss, I’m going to go post up over yonder, for a few hundred years, and I don’t want to be disturbed. Please don’t call me, unless you need me, and don’t let the others know where I’m at.”
I thought, and your mileage obviously varies, that they did an adequate job of explaining in the movie, that they don’t meddle in human wars. Unless they had working intel on what Thanos’ actual plan was (which I find it easy enough to believe that they didn’t but, again, mileage varies), they may have just written Thanos’ invasion off as another “human” war: an alien planning to conquer Earth doesn’t inherently impact the population, at least not enough to warrant their interference. By the time they found out what Thanos was actually up to, it was too late.
Same could be said about Malekith: since Svartalfheim is considered another “realm,” they probably had no idea what he was up to, and the existence of the Infinity Stones was probably not something that the Celestials felt that they needed to know about. It would have been super-sweet to have seen Sersi and Sprite aiding Thor in London, especially considering their respective power sets, and the movie’s particular MacGuffin. But, aside from the logistical nightmare trying to cast someone who looked 12 in 2013, and still looked 12 in 2020 (Lia McHugh was eight years old, when Thor: The Dark World was released), I agree with whomever it was upthread who suggested that the correct answer is that Kevin Feige hadn’t thought that far ahead.
How? If you’re living in the jungles of Central America with the super power of mind control in 1600, how do you update someone on the other side of the world with your location?
Look, I’m not saying it’s impossible to come up with an answer, or that it ruined the movie. It just felt frustratingly poorly-thought-through to me.
It was kind of an extension of the frequent issue with superhero movies: how strong is Captain America, exactly? Well, he’s exactly strong enough to barely overcome, or barely not overcome, whatever obstacle he’s currently facing, as the plot demands. How good are the Eternals at communicating with each other and knowing each others’ locations? Exactly as good at it as is demanded by the exigencies of any specific plot moment.
And while pretty much all superhero stories have issues like that, some do a better job than others of keeping it subtle; for whatever reason in this case it jumped out at me.
That link is to the current strip; this one is the relevant page.
How? I dunno, carrier pigeon? Who cares? If you measure time in epochs, what difference does it make whether it takes your message ten days or ten years, to get to its recipient?
I don’t get why this is an issue. Just addressing this particular topic rather than the issue of putting Eternals in the Thanos story: Re-cast the role when needed. Simple. This is fiction. They’re not real people. They don’t have to be played by the same actor.
Agreed, to a point. It only matters, inasmuch as it was relevant to the plot, as Sprite being unable to (permanently) change her appearance factored into her motives for betraying the other Eternals. I suppose that they could have pulled a Don Cheadle, and acted like there was nothing different, except Rhodey’s physical appearance is not relevant to the plot.
Again, this is fiction. It’s pretend. You pretend that the two actors look identical. Or rather when you are watching one film, you don’t think about what the other actor looked like. They’re acting. It’s not a documentary. The things you see on screen are not meant to be literally true.
Well, first of all, there’s probably not a way to get messages AT ALL around the world in the 1600s. And secondly, if the messages you’re trying to convey are along the lines of “hey, quick update, we got flooded out and are now living 100 miles further west”, then you can’t really wait around years to make sure the message got all the way there and back.
Again,
Again, my point is not “ooh, I have found an inconsistency which can not possibly be resolved”, it is “I have found a seeming inconsistency which the film itself doesn’t address”. Sometimes, in fantastical stories like this one, the writers and worldbuilders have exhaustive backstory for all of this stuff which is internally consistent and answers all the questions I could ever come up with and zillions I never came up with; and they just didn’t have the budget or screentime to fit those answers in. And sometimes they just write whatever the heck they want and don’t care/think about consistency. And, for whatever reason, this issue (which is pretty darn central to several character’s arcs) feels like the latter rather than the former. And that bugs me, a bit. I would have preferred a few seconds of screen time to indicate that when Ikarus bailed on (I’ve forgotten her name now?) he “blocked her on his transponder” or “but do check update me with your position ever 5 years, used the (technobabble) if necessary”, or something… anything to make it clear that they had thought about it.
Again, they’ve got a space ship.
So… you’re living in the amazon jungle, and a forest fire forces you and your tribe to move 50 miles west. How does the existence of a spaceship on the far side of the world help you communicate that message to anyone?
This isn’t an oversight nor an inconsistency. It’s just something that wasn’t worth the time to explain.
More than likely they had some sort of communicators. They were very technologically advanced, after all. We don’t see the communication happening because when we do see them, they’re either together (pre-breakup) or post worldwide communication. I don’t recall any scenes set in the intervening years. And since we didn’t see any of them during the breakup years, we didn’t need to see or have explained how they kept in touch with Ajak.
That’s just like, your opinion, man. Seriously, it bothered me enough for me to have mentioned it in this thread, obviously. And it’s clearly an inconsistency… at one point it’s important to the plot that Eternals can’t find each other. And then later on, they unerringly find each other.
Now, it’s certainly neither a major nor an unresolvable inconsistency. I’m not saying someone ought to lose their job or anything. But it certainly made the film feel, at least to me, as if the worldbuilding was not fully fleshed out. Which at least somewhat inhibited my enjoyment of the film. And as of yet, no one in this thread has pointed something out to make me feel like it was not, as displayed on screen, inconsistent.
Except that one of the major character-building plot points is that Sersi was abandoned by Ajak a century ago, and had no idea where he went, and waited years for him… yet when she confronted him about that she didn’t say “you stopped answering your comm” or “you blocked me” or anything like that. It was just “you left and I didn’t know where you were”.
That was going to be the tagline for the film:
.
THE ETERNALS
Come for the effects!
Stay despite the whole thing
not being quite fleshed out…
I just kind of assumed that they would check in with the ship occasionally and leave messages about where they were, and Ikarus stopped checking in while he was off pouting for a century or so. Obviously nothing in the actual show says that’s what’s happening, but it made lots of sense to me.
I hate to come off as combative or belaboring a point (probably far past the point of no return on that front here), but… are you saying that that’s how you mentally imagined it happening, just in your own headspace? Or are you saying you think it’s likely that’s what was “canonically” happening, like, officially, in background material that the filmmakers developed but which never made it onto the screen? Because it’s easy enough to come up with a theory (a “fanwank” if you will) which explains what we saw (although not trivial… again, how does one “check in” with a spaceship on another continent with 16th century technology and communication?), but there’s a difference between “yeah, there’s a discrepancy in the storytelling and worldbuilding there… here is my personal theory that fills it” vs “I’m confident that the writers intended X to be what fills in the apparent discrepancy, but due to runtime concerns, or budgetary concerns, or just deciding the story flowed better without it, they ended up leaving the explanation of X on the cutting room floor (or out of the final draft of the script)”.
To put it another way, if we went to an Eternals panel at a con, and stood up and asked the screenwriters “hey, here’s an apparent contradiction…”, do you think there response would be:
(a) oh, yeah, we know, it’s absolutely resolved by (genuinely reasonable explanation), that didn’t make it onto film
or
(b) oh, yeah, we know, it’s resolved by (wanky explanation that raises more questions than it answers), that didn’t make it onto film
or
(c) yeah, we know it’s somewhat inconsistent, but we decided that we were willing to sacrifice consistency for good storytelling, and we really needed the story beats to be what they were
or
(d) huh, honestly I never thought about that, good catch, I wish we’d caught that early enough in the scripting process to figure out a way around it
or
(e) it’s a superhero movie, with people who can fly and do magic and angels hatching out of planets, who gives a shit, get a life!!!
Because there are certainly shows or movies I watch where, if I spot something that seems contradictory, I have enough confidence in the overall cohesive nature of the worldbuilding that I strongly suspect there is an answer, it just got squeezed out, for whatever reason. And, for whatever reason, Eternals didn’t inspire that confidence in me.
Oh yeah, it’s totally just a fanwank.
After Sersi didn’t know where Ikaris had been, I too was thrown by them just knowing where everybody else was. To me it makes sense that it was something simple, and not even worth mentioning. The simplest is that they’re just aware of where the others are, unless like (apparently) Ikaris did, they mask their signal.
Ajaks had the space phone she swallowed, which she passed on to Sersi. So clearly they have the technology to communicate across vast distances. These are constructed beings, so they can be full of whatever alien magic/technology is useful, with no need to rely on period human tech.
Or they have some ancient celestial form of the Weasley clock back at the ship, or a celestial group message they drop periodic check-ins on.
All that’s necessary is that they have a way to know where the others are, and this way can be blocked.
All just fanwank though.
To me the biggest mystery was where Kingo went for the final fight. I did fall asleep for a few minutes, and then he was gone. Dinesh always was a flake, but I knew that wasn’t the explanation.
There were lotsa questions, but it didn’t deter me from actually liking the film. I’m surprised at how low the ratings were considering I’d seen some in Marvelverse not as great with higher ratings/reviews
Folks saying nobody knew where Ikaris was, I supposed he was staying incognito to the point nobody knew where he was. I was surprised everyone knew where Druig was since the Amazon covers jillions of miles. (but then someone reminded me he was still interacting with folks like GIlgamesh and Thena when GIlgamesh said he could take trips and have Druig have Thena fall asleep.
Why Eternals made a huge impact on me was that it introduced me to Barry Keoghan, I didn’t know who this actor was and got to see his past works. I really loved American Animals, which revealed the fact I really have no idea what small films are out there, released quietly and missed over general audiences.