There was some interesting Science Fiction material in this movie. There are also callbacks to the Marvel comic book Celestials. We saw Eson the searcher destroy a planet in footage from Guardians of the Galaxy. We also have seen the inside of a dead celestial in Knowwhere. The concept of Knowwhere has a close connection in my mind with the “god island” that the Githyanki live on in the Astral plane in D&D.
In this movie, we meet Arisheim the judge.
The Eternals in the comic books, and their brothers, the Deviants, are creations of the celestials from the DNA of the humanoids of the planets they seed, or infest, or create. Thanos and Starfox are Deviant and Celestial brothers in their back story, from the moon of Titan, or planet Titan, or some other origin story like that. It is complicated.
In the movie, the Eternals are cybernetic humanoids, androids if you will. You
might also prefer Cylons, if you watched the 2003 reboot of Battlestar Galactica. These are way more powerful Cylons, from a way bigger World Forge.
The World Forge was cool. I love that kind of massive universe building story. The job of the Eternals is to see to the development of the human race on its planet, and also fight off the deviants who also want to be the top of the food chain.
The trope of course, is that Humans Are Meant To Be Eaten. And Deviants were the original Eternals, meant to help the development of humans by eating apex predators. But the Deviants got too good at their job. So then there had to be the Eternals to stop the Deviants from eating the humans.
Why should the Deviants not eat the humans, and why does the human race have to be developed? Bad news everyone, there is a Celestial seeded within the Earth. When it is born, it will feed on the lifeforce of the humans, because they have reached a critical population mass.
The leader of the team knew this, and has been birthing Celestials for eons. The rest have too, but their minds get wiped after each mission. It causes a bit of a problem after many missions. You thought you were from Olympia? Wrong, you are from a matrix pod. Once the Eternals team members figure out the truth, some rebel against the Celestial decree to save the human race. It is a super hero Civil war if you will. This guarantees some Eternal on Eternal action, and not the PG-13 kind we saw earlier on the beach.
The Eternals on the side of the humans win out, and prevent the birth of Tiamat the Celestial. We were told that Tiamats birth would destroy the earth, but it looks more like a boil popping. The recent Tonga eruption was far more dramatic. I suppose it was the life force draining that was the real problem. In my mind what we witnessed was a partial-birth abortion of a celestial by the very people that were supposed to protect and nurture it.
Arisheim is a cosmic horror. And the fact that he did not resemble an octopus makes him no less evil. There is a bit of Lovecraft in this movie.
I took note of all the Sci - Fi concepts in this movie, and I hope there is more exploration of that. But the social commentary that was painted on this needs a few years to flake off. {BB}