“Eternals,” the latest addition to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, is a two-and-a-half-hour epic that introduces nearly a dozen new characters, hops back and forth through time over thousands of years, and begins with an opening text crawl that reveals a previously unknown origin of the human species.
The Eternals comic debuted in 1976 after its writer, Jack Kirby, returned to Marvel following a five-year stint at DC.
The Eternals reveals that thousands of years ago, a group of giant extraterrestrials known as the Celestials came to Earth and experimented on apes to create three new species: humans, Eternals and Deviants.
Set after the events of “Avengers: Endgame,” the film reveals flashbacks to how the Eternals interacted with humans over the course of history while in the present, they try to stop a cataclysmic event from destroying the Earth.
An idea featured in the original Eternals comic and in the film is that the Eternals are secretly the inspiration for humanity’s greatest myths.
The movie features 10 Eternals, including Ikaris, who can fly and shoot laser beams out of his eyes; Sersi , male characters in the comic, were changed to female for the film.
In the comics, he teamed up with various heroes to take down his genocidal brother and joined the Avengers for a time, but he tends to be invested in more worldly pleasures.
On his death bed, Nathan asks Whitman to take up the mantle of the Black Knight and use his weapons and research for good rather than evil.