(upbeat music)
- What's up, guys. Michael here.
Today, we're talking about Marvel's attempt
to make it to the god tier, Eternals.
The latest film is perhaps the biggest expansion
of the MCU since things went inter-galactic,
and not only are we now dealing with heroes,
villains and talking raccoons, but with bonafide gods.
Plus, they brought an Oscar winner Chloe Zhao to direct,
so we were pretty stoked,
but does Eternals actually take advantage
of this heavenly new perspective?
We'll find out in this Wisecrack Quick Take
on Eternals: are humans worth saving?
And of course, spoilers ahead.
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Okay, back to the show.
Eternals revolves around a group of immortal warriors
sent to Earth by their God/Celestial Arishem
to protect and guide humanity.
However, they discover that an unborn Celestial
buried inside Earth will eventually burst out,
thus destroying all of humanity.
Even worse, the Eternals also learned
that they'd done this to a bunch of other planets
with Arishem wiping their memories after each mission,
which is a lot to take in.
Now that they know their destructive purpose,
the Eternals have to decide,
should they carry out Arishem's plan?
If the Celestial is born,
it will create tons of new life and new planets,
which is good, however, it'll also annihilate all
of humanity, which is bad.
The team is ethically split.
Sersi and her pals take a stance that's similar
to the Deontological ethics of Immanuel Kant.
For Kant, ethics is about only doing something
if you'd want your actions to become a universal moral law,
and he offers something called the Principle of Humanity
to help make these decisions slightly easier.
He says that we should act in such a way
that you treat humanity, never merely as a means,
but always at the same time as an end,
which means that the value of human life
should be the key factor in our ethical decisions,
and for many of the Eternals,
the unique moral value of humanity
is something worth fighting for.
Conversely, right-eyed Ikaris
takes a more utilitarian perspective.
He believes that sacrificing humanity is worth it
for the sake of creating billions more lives
across the galaxy.
Basically, it's okay to sacrifice
the potential pleasure of one group,
for the sake of creating happiness,
and pleasure for a larger group.
However, Classical Utilitarianism, a la John Stuart mill
was only really talking about human happiness,
not the potential happiness of yet to exist space creatures.
So, Ikaris' stance isn't classically utilitarian,
Ikaris falls more in the realm
of contemporary utilitarian philosopher,
and king of unrealistic examples, Peter Singer,
unlike the old school utilitarians,
Singer believes that non-human life forms
are equally worthy of ethical consideration.
Thus, his militant veganism,
and stance towards animal liberation.
Presumably, Celestials and Deviants and space creatures
that Ikaris wants to protect, would also count.
Since the unborn Celestial
will ultimately create more pleasure and happiness
for more beings in the Universe,
Ikaris is firmly team space guide,
but the film eventually seems to side with the Sersi,
and thus Kant, arguing that the cosmic uniqueness
of humanity is worth preserving,
and this fits with Marvel's larger ethos,
even as the MCU has expanded to include Asgardians,
aliens, and inter-dimensional beings,
humanity has always remained central to its universe.
- Thanos erased half of the Universe,
but the people of this planet,
brought everyone back with a snap of a finger.
- [Michael] However, the existence of Arishem,
and the Celestials actually presents the internals
with an even tougher moral quandary.
For 7,000 years,
they have been blindly following their deity's designs.
Now that they know what he's up to,
they have to decide whether to continue to obey him.
Basically, they have to decide
whether to dethrone a God or not.
A problem, which sadly never came up during Sunday school,
and you know where this is going.
Like all Marvel movies, Eternals concludes
with a bout of super-powered fisticuffs.
Sersi and co attempt to stop the Celestial's birth
while Ikaris and Sprite, try to protect Arishem's plan,
and Kingo just kind of bounces.
On a deeper level, the factions are fighting about
whether a person's duty to God
outweighs their duty to humanity.
In Ikaris' view, duty to God comes first,
and to say otherwise is pure blasphemy.
For Sersi and Ajak, it's worth rebelling against a God
to protect mankind,
especially when your God is super imperfect,
and regularly sacrifices billions of lives.
All in all, Sersi's dilemma suggests
that taking your moral guidance
from a higher power might be kind of sucks.
On this point, Eternals might've found a fan
in Friedrich Nietzsche.
He was all about critiquing how religion can turn people
against the world and their fellow humans.
Nietzsche believed that Christianity could lead a person
to value things that were not of this world
over those within it,
like valuing heaven over earth.
He thought that once your hypothetical afterlife
and divine daddy's opinion become more important to you
than the lives of your fellow humans,
you can justify doing all kinds of horrible things.
This is why he thinks we need to create our own moral values
that are distinct from those offered via religion.
Sersi and co have found that out firsthand.
Following Arishem teachings with fundamentalist fervor
has led them to annihilate countless planets.
The destruction has been justified on the basis
that these lost lives were less important
than the Celestials.
The film, like Nietzsche seems to be saying,
when your moral compass is dictated
by something outside this world
is liable to lead ya to some pretty dark places,
and in a Nietzschean sense,
this leads some of the internals
to create their own new values.
Phastos, Sersi, and the others choose
to reject Arishem's values
and commit to protecting humanity.
Their choice is heavily influenced
by their intimate connection to earth and its inhabitants.
The once cynical Phastos has found love and family
turning the principle of humanity
into his number one priority.
Sersi has also enjoyed romance
and developed love for humanity at large.
Conversely, the characters who've never felt
at home in human society
remain willing to follow Arishem's plan.
Sprite's childlike form made it difficult
for her to connect with humans,
and she wound up resenting them.
Similarly, the floating Ikaris remains
at a remove from earth,
merely watching over it from above,
making it hard to form actual connections
with those stuck on the ground.
Interestingly, Kingo who has spent decades
as a beloved Bollywood star is caught in the middle.
He agrees, at least intellectually,
with the value of destroying earth to create new worlds.
Still, he isn't quite willing to kill his friends
in service of his God.
Instead, he nopes out right before the climactic battle.
Here, both sides are defined by their loyalty
to or rebellion against God.
However, their ethics are also based
on their relationship to humanity.
Those with an emotional connection to humans,
rebel against Arishem while those without,
continue to follow him,
and inside him with Sersi and co,
the movie seems to be saying
that you cannot base your moral beliefs
solely on something which exists out of the world, i.e. God,
that's because your morals can't be formed in a vacuum.
They're always informed by life experience,
justifying your actions as the will of God
is simply a way of offloading your responsibility
for the choices you make.
Our sense of value will ultimately always come
from the flawed, mortal, messily human perspective,
we have down here on earth.
It might not be as clean as getting our ethics etched
in stone tablets straight from the mountaintop,
but it's the only real morality we've got.
Eternals brings up some interesting questions
about the value of human life,
and how much we actually matter in the eyes of the cosmos,
and yet it never really comes to any satisfying answers.
Part of this is because Eternals waits way too long
to reveal its core moral dilemma.
For the sake of springing a surprise
on the audience, it sacrifices our chance
to see the characters really wrestle with the issue.
What's more,
we don't really see characters morally deliberate
about the quandary.
They all seem to have made up their minds.
Watching these thousands of years old relationships crumble
should be devastating,
but the film's more focused on getting
to the next CGI battle.
Even after Ikaris is defeated,
he doesn't reflect on his choices,
or question his total devotion to a flawed God,
instead, he just eats himself into the Sun.
Eternals pushes the MCU into the realm
of gods and immortals,
allowing it to tell stories that stretch across eons,
and ask important questions about life itself.
However, it never really finds a way
to dramatize the conflict
between blasphemers and fundamentalists
As a result,
it ultimately adds up to a bunch of very charismatic actors
beating up CGI squid dogs across multiple millennia,
and well, that's a bummer,
it's still cool that the MCU was willing
to break from the established formula,
and maybe next time they asked big questions like this,
they'll dig a little deeper in search of the answer.
But, what do you guys think?
Is Eternals right to value human life
over a little baby Celestial?
Or are numbers more important than feelings?
Let us know what you think in the comments.
Big thanks as always to our patrons,
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