Marvel Studios dropped a new trailer overnight for Chloé Zhao's upcoming Phase Four film, Eternals, and this one finally doles out some answers to a few of the big questions fans have had since the first footage released. The Eternals are nearly immortal, a race of cosmic beings placed on Earth to protect humanity. Yet they've never acted in the Marvel Cinematic Universe before. They've let Thanos and his allies attack, and permitted world wars. But there is an answer to that seeming indifference, and it's both simple and unsettling -- it's just not their job.
The three minute long trailer provides a ton of information for fans to sift through, and it's not cagey about its cosmic roots. The effects of the Snap are addressed in its first seconds, showing that the Eternals are fully aware of what it did and what it's about to cause. It's less than a minute later than Kit Harrington's knightly character, Dane Whitman, braces Gemma Chan's Eternal Sersi with the armor-piercing question: Why didn't the Eternals stop Thanos, or any other of the great evils that have touched Earth? The answer feels deliberately unsatisfying. The Celestials instructed them not to, unless Deviants were involved.
It's on par for the Celestials as they've been portrayed in comics. They're not interested in the minutiae of mortal life. What they care about has been vague ever since their 1976 introduction in Jack Kirby's Eternals #1. The Celestials drift from world to world, seeding them with new life and experimenting with their genetic makeup. The Eternals are left to protect the Celestials' newborn creations. And the Deviants were mutations that often didn't fall in line with the Celestials' expectations. The Eternals, suggest the comics, are expected to prune the Deviants so they don't overrun the human experiment.
Sersi's tone almost suggests she knows it's not a great answer, and it helps to highlight the eldritch nature of the Celestials. They're too far removed from the human experience to be understood, much less care about "small" things like intergalactic war or human strife, or even Thanos' horrific genocide. Only the mutative Deviant threat matters, because it's the only thing that could impact whatever plan the Celestials have. And for seven thousand years, the Eternals have abided by that overriding command.
The trailer makes it clear that the situation has changed. The Deviant threat is now an active situation, allowing the Eternals to come together again after centuries of separation. It's an unusual kind of family reunion, and it's triggered by what the trailer calls an "Emergence." It's not clear if the Emergence and the renewed Deviant threat are entirely the same thing, but there's enough of an overlap to finally push the Eternals into action.
It's too late for hundreds of thousands of people throughout history that the Eternals could have saved, but it remains to be seen how loyal the Eternals really are to their creators after millennia of being left alone. The trailer makes it clear that the Eternals love and care for their charges, which brings up some new questions of how much did they suffer, watching centuries of horrors happening to humanity that, by command, they could do nothing about.
With a new threat on possibly two fronts, and given freedom at last to protect it, it's not likely that it'll be easy for the Eternals to return to a life of non-intervention afterward. Humanity needs people to care for each other more than ever, and with some of the biggest Avengers off the roster and the scars of the Snap still lingering, the new trailer may have answered the question of where the Eternals have been and what they're about to face. But it's still going to be worth asking what they'll do next.
Directed by Chloé Zhao, Eternals arrives in theaters Nov. 5.