November | 2021 | A Screenwriters Perspective: Current and Past Movies.

Anyone who is not a bankable actor or star in the movie industry, has to wonder at times what it must feel like to accept a role in a Marvel movie, or any movie that requires you to dress up in ridiculous costumes and recite what at times can be equally ridiculous dialogue. There are actors out there, that regardless of their relative success, probably refuse to make movies like “Eternals”, thinking they would hate looking so ridiculous or might laugh when it was time for their speaking parts.

The first and most important part of the new and anemic Eternals movie is that at 2 hours and 37 minutes, it is way too long. There is no reason that a movie like this, about aliens called eternals who arrive 5000 years ago to protect the planet earth and fight killer aliens called the Deviants, should be this annoyingly long. We did not need to see what happened 1000, 2000 and 5000 years ago, so often during this mostly boring and bad movie. It seemed at times that the screenwriter and director thought that the way to make this movie better or more relevant was to pad it another 45 minutes, causing most of the people in the audience I was in, to constantly check their watches. Enough already.

Some critics have said that Eternals is the worst movie in the entire Marvel series and unfortunately I do agree with this opinion. This film as a number of well known actors including Angelina Jolie (who has a surprisingly small part), Salma Hayek, Kit Harington, Brian Tyree Henry, Harry Styles, Salma Hayek, Kumail Nanjiani and Richard Madden. The obvious plan here was, we have a weak script about another Marvel comic book series, lets throw many big named stars at it, to get people in the theaters. We have all seen this idea fail many times in the past, this movie will have the same result because a bad screenplay will always result in a bad film. Some of the special effects were very good, including the creation of incredible looking Deviant creatures, but there were too many boring and dead areas in this story, and I was surprised I did not doze off during some of these unnecessary long drawn out parts.

The Rotten Tomatoes ratings for Eternals is an understandably and correctly low 48%, my rating is about the same, and I cannot recommend this long and mostly boring Marvel movie.

The problem with the screenwriter and director of the movie “Spencer”, which is about the depressing private life of the late Princess Diana is that when you show her stark, depressing, dark, lonely, boring life – the actual movie is also going to be just as depressing dark and lonely. Who wants to sit for 2 hours watching a dark, lonely depressing and mostly boring life unfold?

This movie is not about the months and weeks before Diana’s untimely death in 1997 while being chased by paparazzi’s in Paris France, or her relationship with Dodi Fayad, or even her bad marriage to Prince Charles. This is a story about a few months in Diana’s life where she was surrounded by old and mostly empty buildings, servants and constant loneliness and depression. Who would have ever thought that getting married to Prince Charles in 1981 and becoming one of the most famous women in the world, would ultimately become the worst thing that ever happened to this woman? The actress Kristen Stewart does not look that much like Diana, or sound that much like her, but she did master many of her subtle mannerisms and because of her acting she might just get an Academy Award nomination.

However, for me this movie was just too boring and depressing for me to recommend it, making it almost impossible to understand the high ratings of 86% on Rotten Tomatoes. I am even surprised the producers would think that this screenplay would be interesting enough to make a movie in the first place.

I disagree with the high critical reviews of this movie and do not recommend Spencer.