The new and apparently final trailer for Marvel’s Eternals opens on the first of several very dramatic, pseudo-profound line readings by an outstandingly beautiful woman. On a remote ranch (nearly the entire movie seems to take place on desolate fields, beaches, and forests), Salma Hayek tells Richard Madden that the take-back snap that brought the snapped-away population back used enough energy to kick-start the ominously-named EMERGENCE. Ut oh!
Soon after, Gemma Chan explains that the reason she and the rest of the titular crew didn’t help out against Thanos was that they’re sworn to not interfere with humanity unless “Deviants” are involved. So, for 7,000 years, she, Hayek, Madden, Angelina Jolie, Kumail Nanjiani, Barry Keoghan, Brian Tyree Henry, and a handful of other Eternals have just been observing us, intervening only to occasionally braid our hair. The Eternals love us, which does not track at all given the last 7,000 years of human history, and while they were not allowed to stop the Holocaust or anything, they are going to protect us from the Emergence.
And what is the Emergence? It’s like, some weird dinosaurs or something are turning up. It’s fine, though, because the Eternals can fight them with their goldness. They have gold blades, and gold eye beams, and gold finger-guns, and the ugly Avatar creatures are no match for them. Their powers also extend to taking “Marvel humor” to insufferable new levels never before seen.
Recent Oscar-winner Chloé Zhao’s Terrence Malick’s Marvel’s Eternals hits theaters November 5.
