The Eternals have lived on Earth for 7,000 years. That’s a long time, but their movie somehow manages to feel even longer than that. Now, if the Eternals predate the Avengers by a few millennia, and have been actively and openly involved in various periods of human history, where where they during the events of the last two Avengers movies?
Since those (mis)adventures had nothing to do with “Deviants”, the Eternals presumably couldn't be bothered to lift a finger. If that’s the case, why did they stay on Earth so long after the Deviants had supposedly been eradicated?
And if the Deviants are at least as old as the Eternals, why are they called after a word in a language that wasn't going to exist until eons later? This question actually has an answer, albeit a nonsensical one: as far as I can discern English is, for some unfathomable reason, the lingua franca of the Universe, which of course includes both the Earth and Olympia.
One Eternal even communicates with sign language, which I guess means she invented it. Moreover, several Eternals have an unambiguous ethnicity; are we to understand that they originated these, for lack of a better term, races on our planet?
Or is it just a big coincidence that Olympia has Mexicans, Irish, Scottish, Pakistanis, and South Koreans? And speaking of inventions, it seems that ancient civilizations were more (or less, as the case may be) technologically advanced than we had previously thought; specifically when it comes to the CGI that they apparently used to build their cities.
This imagery that looks straight out of Age of Empires is the reason that Eternals never generates the slightest sense of urgency (and if it did, it could never keep it up for the more than two and a half hours of running time).
Who cares about the destruction of the world when the world in the first place is plainly phonier than a diploma issued by Megatrend University? Hell, the entire Universe seems to consist almost exclusively of green screens.
How much respect or fear can Arishem and the Deviants respectively inspire or instill when they are nothing more than shapeless masses of pixels? All things considered, the only redeeming thing about this film is that it points out (unwittingly, I must assume) the arbitrariness of everything that has to do with the MCU: "Five years ago, Thanos wiped out half the population of the universe ... But the people of this planet brought them all back with a snap of the fingers." Now imagine a 7,000-year long finger-snap.