Wendiggy!

We saw a couple of previews of Antlers (2021) on other DVDs. Ms. Spenser liked the look, and it was produced by Guillermo del Toro, so we queued it up.

It takes place in the damp depressed Pacific Northwest. A kid is waiting in the pickup truck while his dad and a buddy are down in a mine - cooking meth, it turns out. Something comes out of the mine and the kid goes to investigate. We don't see what happens, but we don't think it will be great.

Next, we meet Keri Russell, a school teacher in the town. She moved back recently to live with her brother Jesse Plemons, the sheriff. They don't get along too well. We find out later that she ran away from her abusive father, leaving Plemons behind. We also see that she's trying desperately not to drink.

One of her students is Jeremy T. Thomas, a thin. bullied, withdrawn type. She tries to get close to him, and suspects that he is being abused. We see a bit of his life - he collects roadkill, takes it to his rundown house and tosses it into a locked room there. His father and brother, from the first scene, are in there. The father has become feral, and the brother blood thirsty. Eventually, the titular antlers come out of the father's mouth, followed by a monster that tears him apart from inside.

Russell visits the house, and finds it a shambles, stinking of death and rot. When she finds the locked room, she suspects that the children are being kept there, and opens it. Now the monster is loose. People start dying. Of course, in a small, dying town with a widespread drug problem, that's not too noticeable. Russell wants to do something about Thomas, but Plemons is just overwhelmed. He's tried to get help for him, but the state thinks he belongs with his dad.

Graham Green has been in the background, and is able to give the back story - the monster's a wendigo. Thanks, Mr. Green. He also has advice on how to kill it. Hope it works.

This story is pretty gruesome, both the monsters and the human monsters. Using the wendigo as a symbol for abuse, both drug and parental, makes sense. That's sort of what wendigos are. And the cast does an all around great job. But Ms. Spenser wasn't impressed. She couldn't buy that there was no way to help this obviously abused kid. Obviously, that was one of the points of the movie: we give up on the vulnerable too easily. She just thought it was far-fetched. Not too impressed by the monster design, either, although it showed a touch of del Toro. 

As for me, I thought it was pretty rough emotionally, but fell apart a little toward the end. I would put it on a double bill with Horns, another horny film in the PNW - but more fun, I think.

Beneath Notice

I pretty much forgot that I had watched Red Notice (2021) and that I should blog it. It's a Netflix special - big names, looks like a movie, but something hollow at the core. 

It starts in a museum in Rome. FBI agent Dwayne Johnson and Interpol officer Ritu Arya are concerned that the Egg MacGuffin is going to be stolen by famed jewel thief Ryan Reynolds. And so it comes to pass, leading to a long chase through the museum and adjacent Rome. I mainly mention this because there is a scaffold fight - not as great as the one in Shang Chi, but OK. It lets the movie display its sources. Sadly, they are things other movies do better.

Reynolds gets away to his home in Bali, but Interpol crashes in and retrieves the egg. But other international jewel thief, Gal Gadot, AKA the Bishop, is masquerading as a member of the Interpol team, and she makes off with the egg.

Reynolds goes to a remote Russian prison, and Arya puts Johnson there as well, for good measure. So they decide to band together to get the egg and it's partner (needed for the full set). They will be working against or teaming up with Gadot to get these eggs. But someone may not be what they seem. Maybe everyone.

This is not a bad movie. I'll buck the trend and say that I like Gal Gadot - she may have limited range, but in that range, she's great. Johnson does what he does best here, and so does Reynolds. Of course, Reynolds wisecracks his way through the movie, and gets pretty meta. He calls the egg the MacGuffin, for goodness sake. He says things like, "This is the part where we have a big chase" nd so on. If you like Reynolds, you'll like this. But don't expect anything new or interesting. 

I'm just here for the scaffolding fight.

[Meme of Three Spider-Men Pointing at Each Other]

We got to see the last movie in the Spider-Man "Home" trilogy: Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021). At least I assume it's the last - it had a very end-of-an-era feel.

It starts pretty much right where the last one ended. Spider-Man has killed Mysterio, but the world doesn't know that he's a villain. So Spider-Man is considered a criminal - and ol' J. Jonah's internet video show has outed him as Peter Parker.

This makes Peter a target - Happy Hogan gets him out of the legal problems, but he's still a social outcast. Worse, he and his friends MJ and Ned were going to go to MIT together, but MIT rejects them because "too disruptive". So Peter goes to see his old friend or at least associate, Dr. Strange.

Strange doesn't like the idea of messing with time or memories on a large scale, but Peter did help save the universe, so, just this once. He begins a spell that will make everyone in the world forget Spider-Man is Peter Parker. But what about Aunt May, Peter asks? OK, so he changes the spell. And MJ and Ned? Another change. How about just everyone who knew before Jameson spilled it? Damn it, Peter! At that point, the spell becomes unstable. Strange gets pissed and throws Peter out.

But it was too late. It seems that the spell pulled in people from all over the metaverse who know who Spider-Man is. So we get the Alfred Molina Doc Ock, Willem Dafoe's Green Goblin, and Thomas Hayden Church's Sandman  from the Tobey Maguire universe. From the Andrew Garfield universe  we get The Lizard and Jamie Foxx's Electro. We're only missing Paul Giamatti's Rhino.

Parker manages to catch Doc Ock, then Strange teleports them to his dungeon. At this point he tells Peter, MJ and Ned that they have to find the others - "Scooby-Doo this shit." 

Long story short, they do. Once they've rounded up a few villains, they realize that they were all brought into this universe just before Spider-Man killed them. Peter feels bad about this, and wants to cure them of evil before Strange sends them back. Strange disagrees, and they have a big fight in the psychedelic Mirror Dimension - which Peter wins.

Other than that, the plan isn't really working too well - Doc Ock and the Goblin are trying to be good, but the evil keeps coming out. And Peter's pretty outnumbered. To cut to the chase, two more Spider-Men appear - Maguire and Garfield.

There were big hints about this in the marketing. I tried to ignore spoilers, but I wasn't exactly surprised. But I was delighted. Although they didn't take over the movie, they got to be a solid part of the last third or so. And it was great to see them, almost as great as seeing Alfred Molina and Willem Dafoe. 

Now, this wasn't the perfect Spider-Man. SPOILER - they fridged Aunt May, just so she could deliver the "great power/great responsibility" line. It was practically a throw-away. But in general, we loved this. Dr. Strange and Wong were great as lovable curmudgeons, and there's a post-credit sequence for their next movie. Can't wait.

Bad Neighbors

We saw a preview for The Evil Next Door (2021) before something else we watched. It seemed to be our kind of thing, so we queued it up. It didn't work out quite as planned.

It starts with a drone shot of treetops, a car driving through a forest in Sweden. This shot seems to be obligatory now. The car is carrying Linus Wahlgren, his son Eddie Eriksson Dominguez, and his girlfriend Dilan Gwyn. They have bought a house together and are moving in. Wahlgren's first wife died, and he wants to make a new start with the kid and his girlfriend. She's kind to the kid, but doesn't try to be a mother to him.

The house is in a nice looking development of duplexes. But the other side of their building is run-down (maybe evil?). Dad's job keeps him out of the house for a few days at a time, and there are odd noises. Also, the kid makes friends with another child who isn't there. 

There's really not much more to say about this, because nothing much happens until the big ending. There are a lot of scenes of Gwyn walking slowly and tensely down a corridor to see what made a noise at the end. We might see a shadow run behind her, but mostly it's just very long, drawn out, tense scenes. They either end with a jump scare, or just peter out. I know that sounds like a lot of this kind of movie, but these are so drawn out it's absurd.

In the end, the boy is grabbed by the creepy-crawly and dragged to the evil next-door apartment. Dad is knocked out, and girlfriend has to chase the boy into the basement and face the monster. And when she comes face-to-face....

Our DVD stopped playing. Just spit out a few still frames and stopped, with 5-10 minutes left. Now this happened to us at the start of a DVD (Scarlet Empress), but we could skip to the next scene. We only missed a few minutes. But that wouldn't work here. 

In the end, we decided we didn't care. Ms. Spenser looked up the ending online, and it was about as lame as she expected. I guess there is a horror genre about step-mothers trying to care for kids, maybe them putting her in danger, maybe them putting her in danger, maybe you're not sure. This is sort of the simplest version of that. We didn't care for it. 

The Lake House

I think Netflix recommended The Night House (2021) as supernatural horror, Ms. Spenser's favorite genre, so I queued it up. Then I heard the Blank Check podcast Best of 2021, and they all praised the intensity of lead actress Rebecca Hall. So I queued it up - but also asked Ms. Spenser if we could watch it on a night when I'd have time to watch a few Three Stooges eps as a palate cleanser.

It starts with Sarah Goldberg taking her friend Rebecca Hall home, after a funeral, it seems. She says she'll be all right by herself, in the house her husband, an architect, designed and built. The husband who killed himself. She starts drinking and going through her husband's papers.

On one such evening, she finds a notebook with a sketch of the house, and a house with the same floor plan, but a mirror image. There's a note, like, "Mirror image confuses them." There are some sketches of occult diagrams, and many books on arcane subjects.

She also finds a picture on his phone. It looks like her, but somewhere she's never been. On his computer, she finds more pictures - they definitely look like her but aren't. She suspects that her husband was having an affair, which doesn't make her any more calm and centered. She is having nightmares about evil presences and frightened women. 

Somewhere around here, she goes out for drinks with her friends and co-workers. This is the scene the Blank Check guys were going on about. A small group of friends, just out for drinks, trying to be normal. But one of them has just lost a husband. To suicide. And he was seeing other women. And maybe there's ghosts.

Soon she sees the house across the lake - just like their house but a mirror image. In the windows she sees her husband with many, many women, different women in each room, all who look like her. But it's just a dream - or is it?

I'm not going to spoil this one, or do more than mention their black neighbor who knows more than he's saying, or when Hall actually meets one of the women. I'll assure you that the tension never lets up, and the ending is satisfying and effective. But this is mostly Hall's show. She's in almost every shot and her anxiety, fear, guilt, love, and desperation are palpable. We've seen her here and there (Godzilla vs. Kong) but nothing that features her like this. We've seen director David Bruckner's The Ritual (forgot to blog?) but liked this a lot more. 

Marlene the Great

I queued up The Scarlet Empress (1934) some time after re-watching Destry Rides Again. I remembered that there was at least one classic Dietrich movie that I'd never seen - and directed by von Sternberg!

It begins with Dietrich as an innocent, wide-eyed enthusiastic girl. Her snooty parents have arranged to have her marry Peter of Russia, heir to the throne. Dashing Count John Lodge is tasked with bringing her to Moscow. Along the way, he flirts with her mercilessly, and she, very wide-eyed, is influenced. 

When she gets to Moscow, she discovers that the Empress Louise Dresser is overbearing and, well, imperious - she renames the girl Catherine. Worse, Peter, her betrothed, is a grinning idiot, played by Sam Jaffe. He looks somewhat like he's doing a Harpo Marx impression.

Logan continues to pitch woo, but the empress lets Dietrich spy on her when she receives Logan has her lover. This disillusions her greatly. She is no longer wide-eyed. She makes a point of being friendly with her ladies-in-waiting, and letting them be friendly with the soldiers. Then, she becomes friendly with some of the soldiers herself, and soon Peter has an heir - although he doesn't seem happy about it. 

No longer wide-eyed, she is now bedroom-eyed. She replays the empress' joke on Logan - lets him spy on her when she takes a captain of the guard into her bedroom. This is the kind of sweet perversity we expect and cherish from von Sternberg. 

The whole movie is a fever dream. The palace has walls of great upright logs, doors twelve-feet high and three thick, with handles at head height. It is filled with grotesque statues of worshippers writhing in agony, with outstretched arms and bent backs. There are great candles everywhere. When Logan wants to make love to Dietrich, there is always a candle between them, and he always blows it out. Von Sternberg often films Dietrich behind nets and gauzy veils, and his camera is always moving. And, as the credits state, there are thousands of extras. 

My only complaint is that it ends when she becomes empress, and doesn't get into the horse thing. No, I changed my mind - that's a good thing.

Rings Around the Rest

Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (2021) is a Marvel movie we were looking forward to. And I know I say this about every new Marvel movie (almost), but I think it's my new favorite.

It starts with a voice-over and montage about an immortal warlord, Tony Leung, who commanded ten rings of power. By our times, he runs a shaowy underground criminal organization - He is sometimes known as Fu Manchu, or the Mandarin. His next objective is Ta Lo, a mythical village in China where strange beasts roam. He manages to get there, but finds it guarded by a beautiful woman, Fala Chen. They fight, and her flowing, graceful tai chi defeats his forceful kung fu. But while they fight, they fall in love.

And so do I, with this movie. This fight is first-class, good as almost any you will see in a Chinese wuxia movie.

We find out that the voice-over is Chen, telling her son about her and his father. Leung left the organization and settled down to a domestic life with his wife, son and daughter.

In the present day, we meet Simu Liu, a parking valet in San Francisco, working with Awkwafina. They get attacked on a bus - classic bus fight, like in Nobody or The Villainess) and one of the attackers takes Liu's pendant. He then tells Awkwafina about his history. He is the son of Leung and Chen. Chen was killed when he was young by his father's ex-rivals. That turned Leung evil again, and he started training Liu to be another one of his assassins. But Liu ran away to San Francisco. 

His sister wasn't supposed to be an assassin, but she trained secretly watching the boys. Although they are estranged because Liu left her with her dad, h recently got a card from her, with her address. Now, he is afraid the people who attacked him will go after her for her pendant.

It turns out that she runs an underground fight club in Macao. We even catch a glimpse of Wong from Dr. Strange fighting a creature. And of course, sister (Meng'er Zhang) wants to fight Liu first. Then some thugs steal sister's pendant, and we have a classical scaffolding fight. In the end, they are taken to meet up with dad.

You see, the pendants together unlock a map of the way into Ta Lo - a map that is formed out of a flood of water. Remember, Chinese dragons (we'll get there) represent water, flowing like Mom's tai chi style.

Anyway, Leung has been hearing his wife calling from Beyond. He believes that the people of Ta Lo have her imprisoned. Everyone else can see it's evil influences that want to be released from Ta Lo. I'll skip over most of this, except to mention that Ben Kingsley is back - the Ten Rings gang liked him so much after the Mandarin affair that they keep him around for laughs.

And one final SPOILER - the evil creatures Ta Lo has been holding back are Chthuloids, who are finally brought down by Ta Lo's dragon protector.

There's a lot in this movie (normal for Marvel, I guess) and it's almost all very cool. The fights and other action scenes are amazing. The Chinese elements are very convincingly drawn from Chinese movie culture and fine arts - the dragon was truly awe-inspiring. And the sweetness of Liu and Awkwafina - nice kids who treat Awkwafina's grandmother with respect and kindness, for example. The last scene is hilarious, where they just level with there friends on a night out at the bar. Their friends don't believe it, until Wong shows up out of a portal on an urgent mission - But we'll find out all about that in the next Marvel movies. Can't wait. 

Outrage

 This is sort of out of left-field - Outrageous Fortune (1987) - It's an 80's romantic farce starring Shelley Long and Bette Midler, with Peter Coyote as the guy in the middle.

Long is a perennial drama student. We see her in stage fencing class creaming her opponent and in ballet outjumping everyone in class. When she hears that the great Russian director Robert Prosky is teaching in NY, she goes to beg her family for the money to take his class. Her mother refuses, but her father can't. 

While Long is preparing to audition for the class, Bette Midler bursts into the waiting room to use the phone so that she can bullshit someone out of an overdue bill. This destroys Long's concentration and composure, and she starts haranguing Midler. Just to be ornery, Midler decides to sign up for class - after all, she figures acting is just bullshitting. Besides, she has already been in a biker movie (Long has never been in a single production of anything). 

So there you have the setup - Long is an intense, over-achieving student/under-achieving actor from a whitebread Connecticut suburb. Midler is the brash, trash-talking, loud-dressing, streetwise bullshitter who lovers to antagonize her. Then Long meets Peter Coyote.

Coyote drops by the shop she works in and is just too good to be true - Even if he were just not gay or an actor, it would be too good to be true. Soon, they are spending a lot of time in bed. But what she doesn't know is that he's sleeping with Midler as well. 

Next, he's in a taxi with Long and jumps out at a florist to get some roses. The shop blows up and he's killed. When Long goes to the morgue to see him (he was identified by his wallet), Midler shows up too. While they are fighting, the body is uncovered. The face may be completely gone, but when they look a little lower, they realize that it isn't Coyote. So they set out to find him, together. 

The trail leads to New Mexico, where hippy burn-out and adopted Indian George Carlin offers to be their guide. And so on.

I enjoyed this mainly for the Long/Midler nonsense, and honestly, mainly for Midler. Carlin was funny but under used. Coyote was great, although he didn't get a lot of screen time either. The last act, where it's revealed that Coyote is an international spy villain with an evil plot, etc, puts us in action movie territory, and it's great to see long use her theater skills to win the day. This is all directed by Arthur Hiller, who made of lot of movies like this, and I guess this is better than some of them, not as good as others. 

Every now and then, we try an 80's comedy like this, and sometimes they pan out. We would have liked this better if Midler did any singing. 

Adam Bomb

I dropped down to 2 DVDs at a time, with the intention to watch more streaming. So we tried the new Ryan Reynolds, The Adam Project (2022).

Adam is Walker Scobell, a twerpy 12-year old. His dad has recently died, he gets bullied at school and suspended when he fights back. He torments his mom, Jennifer Garner, but like in a loving way. Adam is also Ryan Reynolds, a fighter pilot in the future who uses his time machine to go back to before the death of his father, against orders from Katherine Keener, ruler of the world in the future.

But he miscalculates and crashes in young Adam's backyard. (By the way, he lives in a very cool modern house in a temperate rainforest-like environment. His dad must have been a Seattle millionaire.) Young Adam figures it out pretty quickly - actually, their dog does, now just a pup.

Reynolds is very annoyed at Scobell, and Scobell wants to know how a skinny 4-foot 12-year old grows up to be Reynolds. Garner thinks he's sort of cute, which is embarrassing. Anyway, Reynolds needs to find his lover, Zoe Saldana. It turns out that she got stuck in the same past, and when they re-unite, they are pursued by futurians on space bikes. This is the action scene we saw in the trailer, and about the only one in the movie.

Anyway, they go back again to find their father, who is Mark Ruffalo. It turns out that he discovered time travel, and Keener stole it from him when he died (or was he killed?). They try to get him to destroy his invention, but he doesn't want to disrupt the time stream any more than it has been. But He bonds with his son, older and younger, in a tender and extremely manipulative scene. At least Reynolds has the grace to be embarrassed by it.

Finally, Keener from the future shows up and they, along with de-aged present-time Keener, have a big showdown at the particle accelerator. As she threatens them with a gun, Ruffalo nobly tells them to get behind him. When Keener says it's an armor piercing round which will go right through the three of them, he suggests they spread out. SPOILER - She shoots, the magnetic field of the accelerator attracts the bullet, it goes through younger Keener, so older Keener vanishes, never having existed. More bonding and personal growth, happy endings all around.

This wasn't bas at all. But it wasn't great, especially considering the stacked cast. I have complained about movies with daddy issues before, but this one really wallowed in it. Also, I thought Reynolds and maybe Ruffalo would be a lot funnier. The whole thing could have been much better. Typical streaming movie. 

Hardy, Harrelson, Harris - Har, Har, Har

Venom: Let There Be Carnage (2021) was not one of the big Marvel (Sony Marvel?) movies we were looking forward to. But, hey, the first one was fun, Tom Hardy is fun, and Andy Serkis is directing.

It starts with Woody Harrelson as Cletus Kasady, a murderer locked up in prison. Through a drain pipe, he can talk with his childhood friend and lover, Naomi Harris. When they come to take her away, breaking up their only human connection, they freak out. She has mutant screaming abilities, which she unleashes. A guard shoots her and she winds up in Ravencroft, one of those science prisons, where they will experiment on her.

Meanwhile, Tom Hardy is having trouble with his symbiote - a typical Odd Couple roommate (body mate?) situation. But he gets a call that Harrelson wants to talk to him and no one else. He visits the prison and Harrelson tells him about growing up in an orphanage where he was horribly abused - just like in The Gathering. With the same results.

Hardy notices some sketches and doodles Harrelson has done - and one is a clue to where the bodies are buried. This is a real career boost for him, and his police buddy, Stephen Graham. On the other hand, his ex-wife tells him she's getting married to her doctor boyfriend, which is a bummer for Hardy. Venom takes it very badly. 

Harrelson also was pretty irritated that Hardy wrote about finding the bodies, but not enough about the reason he killed them. So he invites Hardy to his execution, and bites him hard on the finger - getting a sip of symbiote. His line is something like, "I've tasted blood and that wasn't it." When they start the lethal injection, a new symbiote, Carnage, comes out, and breaks him out of jail, with maximum damage.

Harrelson finds Harris and they head for the orphanage to burn it down. Meanwhile, Hardy and Venom have had enough of each other, and Venom takes off to eat heads. So he goes around San Francisco infesting random hosts. But none of them quite suit him. Harrelson and Carnage are also having trouble bonding. For instance, he detests Harris, because of course the symbiotes weakness is loud sounds, and she has sonic powers. It all ends with a fight in a church - the bell plays a big role. 

This is mainly just a lark - some character comedy, some action, Harrelson hamming it up. He's probably my least favorite part - just too goofy to seem threatening. Still, an enjoyable movie, and under 100 minutes.

We Gather Together to Gather Together

As always, I'm trying to find some supernatural horror for Ms. Spenser. No slashers, preferably ghosts, and a moody rather than frantic atmosphere. Since I'm not really a fan, I often choose blindly. I picked The Gathering (2003) because Christina Ricci is in it.

It is set near Glastonbury. A couple of hikers fall into a hole in the earth. He lands in a spike and is impaled. She survives and finds herself in a buried church. Later, art historian Stephen Dullane is brought in to investigate the church. It's most curious feature is that the crucifixion is portrayed from behind, with a crowd of onlookers painted on the wall.

Dullane's wife, Kerry Fox, is driving with her two children and hits Christina Ricci. Everyone is quite shook up, but Ricci is barely scratched. However, she has total amnesia. She has papers indicating that she's an American named Cassie. Fox invites her to stay with her family in their large, recently restored manor house. It's the least they can do after running her down. She also gets along really well with the kids, especially the young boy. He stopped talking when his mother, Dullane's first wife, died. At this point, Ricci just seems too good to be true - she's going to turn out to be a demon or something. SPOILER - she isn't. She really is nice. Also, Fox is not an evil step-mother, but quite a nice one.

So Ricci starts helping take care of the kids, walking them to school and chasing off the bullies. She is hoping someone will recognize her - or she will recognize them. She sees people she sort of recognizes, but they are grim and spooky. She also has visions of bloody horror, associated with a creepy auto mechanic. But she also meets Ioan Gruffudd, a nice guy who takes an interest in her.

Doing some snooping, she figures out that the mechanic was a abused as a kid in an orphanage - that is now the manor that Fox and family live in. She thinks he's going to snap and start killing everyone involved: The priest, a judge, and probably Dullane's mute son. But she can't get anyone to believe her.

SPOILER-ish: It turns out that the creepy people Ricci keeps seeing are the Gathering: The people who came to see Christ crucified, just because it was a spectacle. They are cursed to live forever, observing horrible events and mass killings. Guess what they're doing in this town?

This is kind of a far-fetched gimmick. They fancy it up by mentioning the Wandering Jew and identifying the church with one one Joseph of Arimathea supposedly built in Glastonbury. But outside of that, I liked this a lot. The setting (filmed on Isle of Man, like The Others) is lovely. The characters are much nicer than you might expect, even the ones who turn out have secrets - Gruffudd is a member of the Gathering, but they aren't really evil, just content to allow evil to happen. And Ricci is great in a fairly generic role. 

Also, Ms. Spenser liked it, so it was a success.

Eternal Something

I had high hopes and expectations for Eternals (2021). First, I loved the Kirby series - I don't think I read it much when it first came out, but have since. In fact, I bought my big iPad so I could read that series in Marvel Unlimited. Then there's Chloe Zhao, clearly a talented filmmaker (although we've only seen The Rider. I was very eager to see what she did with the material.

It starts with a text crawl, then we get to meet the Eternals. It's Mesopotamia, something or other B.C. A weird monster comes out of the sea and eats a guy, The monster, who we learn is a deviant, looks like a big dog made out of cables for muscles and no skin. The Eternals show up to fight, each with their own style, but sharing a common ability to conjure glowing golden lines and circles and make them into weapons.

• Gemma Chan (Crazy Rich Asians) is Sersi - she can change things into other things
• Richard Madden is Ikaris - he can fly
• Kumail Nanjani is Kingo - he can project glowing powerballs from his hands
• Angelina Jolie is Thena - her glowing lines become swords and spears
• Another 4-5, I just ran out of steam

We see them do some more fighting through the ages, then it's modern day London. Chan is a museum employee, addicted to her phone like anyone else. She is hanging with her young ward (?) Sprite, Lia McHugh, another Eternal who can project realistic illusions, and her boyfriend Kit Harington, when a deviant attacks. They are not winning like they should, when Ikaris shows up. It seems that him and Chan were a couple, but broke up a few hundred years ago for some reason. She hasn't seen him since. Also, the deviants were supposed to have been wiped out long ago, which is why Chan and McHugh are just hanging out like folks. 

So they head out to find their leader, Ajak, played by Selma Hayek - but not for long, because she is dead. That isn't supposed to happen. 

So they get the band back together. They had been put on early Earth by the Celestial Arishem to control the deviants, and once they were put down, they were just hanging around waiting for a ride back to Olympus. They more or less went their separate ways, and not all of them want to get back together. And what does Arishem think of this?

There's a lot more to the plot summary. This is a long movie, and quite plot dense. I was pleased that, more than a lot of Marvel movies, the plot was quite clear and easy to follow, without being dumbed down. (It's not just that I had read the comics - they were much different.) There were a lot of protagonists, maybe too many, but they were mostly charming and fun to watch. Nanjiani, for example, had become a Bollywood star. He gets a dance number and everything. He has a comic valet, who knows that he's an immortal, who keeps videoing everything (although the other Eternals keep smashing his cameras). Brian Tyree Henry is Phastos, an artificer, who has settled down, married a guy and adopted a kid. Jolie has become madweary - a kind of lethal PTSD, and is hanging out with Don Lee, Gilgamesh, out in New Mexico. Here, Chan gets Arishem to take her call and explain the whole thing to her. 

That takes up the first 1/3 of the movie, maybe. So there's a lot of plot here, but like I say, you can follow it pretty well, unlike some of these movies. And as plots go, it isn't bad. There are a lot of characters, but they are also pretty easy to follow, and also fun to hang out with. I even liked the somewhat corny comic relief. Probably the best is Angelina Jolie as Thena, but she's kind of sidelined. I guess she signed up to do a glorified cameo, and Zhao just kept expanding the plot. Chan as Sersi is probably the least charismatic, which is too bad because she's the POV character. Also, she was almost god-like in Crazy Rich Asians. Here, where she is a god, she plays it as a regular person.

We also get a bit of Zhao beautiful vistas, but not much more than in a lot of movies.

Now, the deviants were not great as villains. The look wasn't bad, but not great. Although (SPOILER) they were gaining intelligence and powers by killing Eternals, they might have been better adversaries if they had intelligence and goals instead of being just mindless killing machines. 

So, was this the greatest Marvel movie yet? No, it was a little disappointing. A fine entry, but not the masterpiece I was hoping for. In this way, it reminds me of the Branagh Thor movies. On paper, having a Shakespearean director work on Thor is perfect. In practice, it was only OK. I think this might have been better than that, but maybe it's just bigger.