Thomas University student, was surprised to learn about the scene, but relaxed when she discovered the film’s rating. In an interview with Indiewire, she called the sex scene “a really beautiful thing.”
The movie was produced under the guidance of director Chloé Zhao. The Eternals was banned in Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Kuwait prior to its release after Marvel refused to censor LGBTQ2IA+ elements of the film for international release, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
The movie is one of many firsts for Marvel featuring a largely diverse cast, representation for the Deaf community and the first LGBTQ2IA+ leads. Marvel’s latest film, The Eternals, is making waves as the first Marvel film to feature a sex scene. But it does seem a little strange for a film that supposedly wants to say something about humanity to seem so uninterested in a crucial human experience.Marvel’s latest film, The Eternals, is making waves as the first Marvel film to feature a sex scene. That these films tend to lack emotional depth with only some exceptions is not necessarily a problem on its own plenty of genre films root themselves in other corners of storytelling. Just like Sersi and Ikaris’ supposed love affair, however, none of these relationships feel believable-in part because the film itself seems so uninterested in them beyond whatever implications they might carry for the plot.Ĭalling the MCU a plot-oriented machine feels hacky at this point-like pointing out that a lot of Star Wars takes place in space. Brian Tyree Henry’s Phastos is one half of the MCU’s first same-sex couple, and Lauren Ridloff and Barry Keoghan’s Makkari and Druig share an ongoing flirtation throughout the film. There are actually three romances in Eternals. The lack of intimacy between Chan’s matter-shifting Sersi and Richard Madden’s Superman-adjacent Ikaris highlights a deeper problem within both Eternals and the Marvel canon more broadly. This is where the aforementioned plasticine sex scene comes in. When the group finally realizes their real purpose on Earth, however, they’re left with some Big Questions about what to do next.Īt the center of it all, ostensibly, is an exploration of humanity-its nobility and its monstrosity. They’re here to make sure things run smoothly but not to protect humanity from itself-a goal that makes little sense even to this puny human brain but that these millennia-old beings never bother to so much as question.
(You know, now that the series has already made its creators billions.) If only the film had anything to say.Įternals revolves around a group of quasi-immortal beings who cosplay as humans on Earth while essentially serving as the crappiest babysitters in the galaxy. Eternals seems determined to right these wrongs and continue Phase Two’s promise to improve on the limitations of Phase One. The discourse surrounding Marvel’s apparent allergy to intimacy has existed for about as long as the MCU, as have conversations surrounding the films’ general lack of diversity and squeamishness around portraying openly gay characters on screen.
(But seriously, how do two people that hot produce such a chilly, clinical vibe the second they touch?!) It’s not even that Richard Madden and Gemma Chan, whose characters we’re supposed to believe have been in love for 5,000 years, share about as much chemistry as a gynecologist and their patient during a Pap smear throughout the film.
Or that it’s comically brief and bereft of any actual passion. It’s not just that the scene is awkward-although it definitely is. Let’s try it this way: Have you ever seen a 6-year-old lay a Ken doll on top of a Barbie doll and then just kind of stare at them because they don’t really know what happens next? That’s basically what we’re working with here. The scene itself ends almost as soon as it begins, so a “detailed” description would be difficult to conjure. It took 13 years and two “Phases,” but friends, those crazy fiends at Marvel have finally done it: In Eternals, the latest dispatch from our most prolific purveyor of spandex cinema, two people finally got to have sex.