The Eternal (1999)

hyped garbage

A Major Disappointment

Very good movie overall, highly recommended. Most of the negative reviews don't have any merit and are all pollitically based. Give this movie a chance at least, and it might give you a different perspective.

Very good movie overall, highly recommended. Most of the negative reviews don't have any merit and are all pollitically based. Give this movie a chance at least, and it might give you a different perspective.

This film seems to be completely pointless. There is no reason why anything that happens in it happens, as if it was written by a small child who got bored halfway through and thought "how can I wrap this up?". And what were Jared Harris and Christopher Walken thinking? Did they do it for a bet? I couldn't tell you the plot, I'm not entirely sure there is one to be quite frank, but if there is it didn't register. Jared and his bird go to Ireland after she falls down the stairs while lashed up, as you do. They go to a house with a very annoying small girl in it, meet Christopher Walken who has dug up some ancient woman preserved in peat. He brings her back to life for no other reason than it continues the story and she shows her gratitude by immediately icing him. From then on it all gets a bit silly. A couple of hours of my life that I'd like back!

This movie was, as some other people already said, very vague. I found this movie in a discount box at a local record store. That is exactly the place this movie should be found in. I wouldn't say this movie was bad though. The camera work was excellent; the eerie atmosphere was really clear throughout this movie, but the storyline was just to flawed to actually make out what really happened, or what was meant to happen. Some scenes though, were just irrelevant, like the one where old lover Joe suddenly came to the house again and, well, didn't really have a further contribution except dying. Plus I wonder what the whole point behind the couple's drinking problem was. It clearly didn't have any further added value to the story. Overall, I would say this movie could have been a lot better if the storyline were worked out in a better way.6/10

The film opens with Nora the drunk and her husband Jim the slightly-lesser drunk cavorting around, drunkenly. "Thank God we're not alcoholics," says Jim. "Oh, I know," says Nora. At least, they do in my recollections of the movie, but sadly not in the actual movie itself. Nora, oddly enough, suffers from blackouts. The obvious cure for her is to go to Ireland and continue drinking heavily, which she does, accompanied by voice-over narration supplied by Alice, the movie's stock creepy little girl. (This movie has two of the most foolproof ingredients for creepiness: a spooky little girl and Christopher Walken.) "They weren't going to be serious," Alice tells us, in the actual movie this time, "because seriousness was reserved for people in tragic countries. Like Africa. And Poland." If this alone isn't worth the rental price, you've got The Bog!, which is only referenced about seventeen thousand times. This is very economical as far as shooting is concerned, since a thousand words are worth one picture, so that's seventeen fewer times we need to actually see the bog. And who wants to look at a lousy old bog when they can watch Christopher Walken hanging onto his title as America's Scary Uncle It Never Talks About by attempting to make out with a long-undead mummy? The only thing that could have made this movie any better would have been if Jared Harris had still been playing Andy Warhol: "Well, gee, Nora, I don't know. I mean, gosh, I don't know about...mummies, or anything. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Well, if you want to, greaaaat."This is one of the funniest movies I've ever seen. Seriously. And seriousness is reserved for me, because I live in California, which, as we all know, is a very tragic country indeed. In the bog!

1st watched 5/26/2002 - 4 out of 10(Dir-Michael Almereyda): Weird story about a druid witch who tries to capture eternity by inheriting her granddaughter's body. At least I think that was the relationship. A kind of eerie quality is held throughout this film not unlike Stephen King's The Shining. The difference is that there was campiness in Nicholson's performance that isn't at all in this film. This is all taken very seriously until near the end when some lame one-liners and attempts at litening up the mood don't work at all. The performances are not the problem here, but the story is. Everything doesn't seem to come together very smoothly and the viewer is left with a lot of pieces of information and no real understanding of what happened in the film. There is a very small throwaway performance by Christopher Walken as the uncle of the granddaughter which, of course, gives him top-billing in an attempt to sell the film. Don't buy into this gimmick and avoid this film.