The MCU’s’ Deviants Change Is The Eternals’ Biggest Marvel Mistake

Eternals spends a great deal of screen time setting up the Deviants, which are posed as the main threat to the Eternals (and Earth), only to find out that they are of little consequence to the final thrust of the film. Ikaris, instead, becomes the villain in an abrupt change that feels like it only exists to be a surprise, rather than a rational and realistic choice made by the character. With the human population already swollen to the point that the birth of a Celestial can take place within Earth, the small continuum of Deviants that re-emerge are more of an annoyance than a threat to the Eternals. It doesn’t help that their look is fairly uninspired, with a generic CGI design that barely registers as anything more than a video game-style creature to dispatch, rather than a formidable foe to contend with.

With so much time and energy spent on marketing the Deviants as the main villain of Eternals, the last-minute villain swap makes their presence worthless to the overall film. The mistake in swapping Ikaris into antagonist mode is that it not only wastes his journey up to that point, but it wastes all the time spent in building up the Deviants as well. The time spent on the Deviants deserved a much better payoff with a more significantly developed threat from them to both the Eternals and Earth. It also would have served to spend more time developing their overall look and design, which feels uninspired and ugly, rather than compelling or scary. Marvel has often struggled (and occasionally succeeded) with their villains, but Eternals feels like a step back in the villain department, both in the execution of the Deviants and the sudden change in Ikaris’ motives.

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