I’ve been upping my movie-seeing game this year (shout out to the AMC Stubs A-List pass), so I decided that I’m going to write some film reviews with the blog this year.
Today I saw the film Eternity with Miles Teller, Callum Turner, and Elizabeth Olsen. You’ve probably seen the ads for it, but in case you haven’t, it tells the story of a woman and her husband who die within a week of each other, but in the afterlife waiting room, they find out her first husband, who died 67 years before they did, has waited all this time for her to come so they can choose an eternity together and be together. So now, she has to decide which guy to spend eternity with.
WARNING Spoilers incoming— Stop reading IMMEDIATELY if you plan to see this film.
So, she chooses Larry, Miles’s character, who was her husband for most of her life and they built a life together. Even though he originally encourages her to choose Luke, the other guy, because through afterlife rules they can identify that she was at her happiest moment when she was with Luke, she realizes that the young, unburdened love she felt for Luke, while technically “stronger”, wasn’t as real to her as her love with Larry and they spend eternity together in a place that looks a lot like the suburbs where they lived together while they were alive. It was a nice ending, and a decent fake-out, because it seems obvious from the beginning that she’s going to choose Larry, the guy with whom she spent most her life, even though Luke is the one that got away (because he died), but then the “you were at your happiest with Luke, not me” thing gets thrown in there and you think for a bit that she’s going to really choose Luke (and because I watched it in the theater, I couldn’t check how many minutes were left in the movie to see if that was the real ending or not).
Overall I very much enjoyed it; great cast, interesting premise, etc. I gave it 4/5 stars on Letterboxd, so that’s pretty good in my book. My one issue was honestly one that I often feel about love “triangles” in films, except magnified because of this story; I thought she didn’t need to choose either and they could’ve just gone somewhere all three of them. I know you’re thinking that that’s not fair to either of them, and they briefly address it early in the movie when she suggests it and both of the men reject the idea because they don’t want each other around. But eternity is a LONG time, and it might be nice to be able to mix it up every once in a while. Also, the guys weren’t friends when they rejected that idea, but through a night of drinking and bonding, they begin to really like and respect each other, and so I think they’re all could’ve worked it out, or at least kept eternity from not getting boring. To be clear, I also think that all love “triangles” are dumb (and shouldn’t count unless everybody’s interested in each other— otherwise, that’s a love “V”) and everybody should just solve their problems by not choosing (I must have some Libra somewhere in my birth chart).
Regardless, I did think the message of the film was sweet and they gave nice justification to why a lifetime of dedicating yourself to someone and to a relationship is real and important, not just wishing for what might have been. Even thought you know from the start that Miles Teller is the right choice (even though someone put way too much concealer on him in some of those scenes), I liked the way they got to that conclusion.
Also, Da’Vine Joy Randolph looked amazing as a platinum blonde. Cheers!
-- Holly
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