How can the Eternals franchise be saved?

Way back in 2008, a little movie named Iron Man introduced us to the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Debuting the same year as Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight, it featured many of the same themes as the Batman sequel: a rich, flawed superhero protagonist who relies on technology rather than superpowers to fight the bad guy; living, breathing, human villains to be taken down, and a neo– real world setting in which the laws of nature seem to be reasonably close to those in our own reality.

But while Nolan’s determination to ground his trilogy in verisimilitude barelyIt is perhaps little surprise then, that Chloé Zhao’s Eternals has received short shrift from audiences and critics alike (it bears a Rotten Tomatoes rating of just 47%) for completely failing to follow the basic set of rules that Marvel itself set in place all those years ago. Instead of gently introducing the titular alien defenders of Earth in preceding episodes, 10 of them are dumped on us all at once in the space of an hour. And just as we’ve barely got our heads around the idea that these extraterrestrial interlopers are here to protect Earth and its human denizens from the evil, monstrous Deviants, it turns out that their true task is to sit back with a bag of popcorn while a giant being known as a Celestial emerges from the Earth’s core and destroys the entire sentient population of the planet.