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Following on from the world premiere of the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s Eternals, an unexpectedly mixed bag of reactions hit the internet, with one of the recurring criticisms of the cosmic comic book adaptation being the sheer volume of exposition contained with a story that runs for over two and a half hours.
While many superhero blockbusters tend to get bogged down in over-explanation, there’s no way Eternals wasn’t going fall into the same trap. When you think about it, the script has to introduce a dozen brand new characters and their respective abilities, establish who they are and where they came from, never mind why they decided to take up residency on Earth.
That’s without even mentioning Celestials, Deviants and the rest of the requisite cosmic mumbo jumbo, so it was almost unavoidable. In a set visit interview via ComicBook, producer Nate Moore did his best to explain the origins and machinations surrounding the titular team’s arch-nemeses.
“As you know, the Deviants in the comics are called the Changing People, no two Deviants look the same. So in our film, no two Deviants will look the same. But you do see as sort of these parasitic predators, when they do kill off a predator in the film, they do take the shape of that predator. So they’re sort of bat-like Deviants. There’s a wolf-like Deviant. There’s a Deviant that look like all sorts of creatures from myth and legend in history.
And these are the Deviants that the Eternals were sent again to eradicate, to help humanity advance. Because the Deviants are the Changing People, they come in all different shapes and sizes. Some are small as a human. Some are as big as an ocean liner, which is a lot of fun for us to play with as we sort of build set pieces in action. But in the modern-day, the Deviants have evolved. And this is a sort of early concept of Kro, who is the leader of the Deviants. He is the most intelligent of the Deviants. He is the only Deviant who can speak and that evolution will be one of the mysteries the Eternals have to uncover.
Why is he able to do this? Why does he look humanoid when all the other Deviants to some degree, are monstrous? He has these sort of incredible tendrils that can extend from his fingers and other parts of his body, and he becomes a real problem for the Eternals.”
The footage has painted the Deviants as CGI blobs set to be easily dispatched in an effects-heavy third act showdown, but let’s hope that Eternals creates some genuine dramatic stakes regarding their relationship and history to the squad, otherwise it’ll by paint-by-numbers MCU watching the good guys cut through the villains with the greatest of ease.