It’s been a dreary week here in New England. Snowy, windy, bitter cold. The kind of week that’s perfect for not doing much besides drinking hot chocolate, ordering take out, and bonding in front of the TV. We started watching “Lost in Space” on Netflix, so far more appropriate than some of my last series choices, the latest Disney movie, “Encanto” and “The Eternals”, as far as I can remember the first Marvel movie that I skipped seeing in theaters.
Three episodes in we are both digging Lost in Space. I was surprised when she picked the animated Encanto but I watch enough cartoons that she certainly wasn’t going to be embarrassed by the choice. She liked the music. I might have dozed off for part of it.
The Eternals was a bit trickier and I’m still not sure how I feel about it. I like that Marvel is exploring the cosmic side of their comics a bit more, just as I hope that the upcoming Moon Knight Disney + show and Blade movie explore the supernatural side. Introducing ten new superheroes plus a couple of other cameos was a lot to handle and probably done as well as could be expected but it made for an overly long film that was hard to get invested in. I’m enough of a comic book fan to know going in that the movie is about a bunch of space robots sent to infiltrate and protect Earth by much larger and powerful space robots but I’m not sure the market is as big for that as there is for Spider Man or some of the other upcoming movies.
( side note: the new Spider Man is awesome )
When I put the movie on I honestly didn’t expect my daughter to last past the nachos but even if it was mainly because she was too comfortable to get up, she watched every two hour and thirty seven minute of it.
Her review is equally as mixed. She had no idea what the hell was going on for the most part. Regarding all the new characters, she thought the new hero Ikaris was a bit of a Superman rip off and that Thena was a Wonder Woman rip off, both valid points, but really liked a few of the others, particularly Phastos and Makkari,
This is where it gets a bit complicated I guess, as these are the two characters that tools on the Internet point to as more forced diversity and wokeness and claim to be the reasons for the movie’s poor reviews and disappointing box office. Makkari is Marvel’s first deaf superhero, Phastos is a gay. Both are black. When I asked her why she liked those characters she didn’t say anything overtly about representation, just that they were cool and that it was nice to see heroes that were a bit more realistic and different.
I’m not sure what she meant by realistic, but if we are talking about a movie about synthetic, super powered humanoids it does makes sense that if there are ten to patrol the entire world there should be Asian, Hispanic and Indo-Persian models included in the plan. If they are living among us for thousands of years it seems likely that at least one would end up gay and even if there isn’t a really good explanation for Makkari being deaf, anyone that has seen actress Lauren Ridloff as Connie on The Walking Dead knows that she kicks ass and maybe her lack of hearing was besides the point.
Multiple times over the years I’ve written about how much more accepting and progressive each successive generation seems to be. This was true for the oldest and her friends and seems to be just as true for the youngest. She is ten and already has one best friend who says that she is gay and another with an older sister that is now living life as a boy. One or both may end up changing their mind at some point but the important thing is that nobody seems to be making a big deal out of either case. The kids are still the same kids and all any of their friends want is for them to be happy and to be themselves. It sounds so simple that’s it’s hard to understand why adults can’t seem to just do the same for each other.
Our children are probably going to be better humans than us and that is a great thing. The Eternals is Marvel’s most diverse film yet and might also be one of it’s worst but those two things really aren’t related. If you ask my daughter that was one of the best things about the film. Just don’t ask her what it was about. I don’t think she knows.
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Previously Published on Thirsty Daddy and is republished on Medium.
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Photo credit: Shutterstock
internal image courtesy of author
