I liked THE ETERNALS more than you did (I felt hiring Chloe Zhao as a director forced Marvel to go outside, and not only rely on Cincinnati and green screen), but—yeah, its big issue was, as you say, how reductive The Trolley Problem is. Jack Kirby tried to "go deep", and the results were laughably juvenile and have dated badly, because he embraced the philosophical side of Sixties counterculture like it was a red sports car or hair plugs.
Not that I think Kirby was being shallow—I only wish he had been (as Stan Lee was later, chasing after "hipness" and the Sexual Revolution like a dirty old man!). Instead, he ran wholeheartedly into the more cosmic mindset of the time, developing the Fourth World saga (NEW GODS, MISTER MIRACLE, THE FOREVER PEOPLE) for DC (which is where the DCEU got Steppenwolf and Darkseid), aspects of which he revisited with THE ETERNALS for Marvel. He wanted audiences to take what he was doing seriously, and those fans who have championed Kirby's work did—unfortunately, like Carlos Castañeda, Harlan Ellison, or Ayn Rand, his ideas were Deep on the Surface, and if you dug underneath them you found there wasn't all that much there.
Yeah...there are fans and scholars who will try to argue that Kirby's late work had intellectual depth, but it always seemed like his genius was in drawing monsters and cool machines, not in philosophizing.
Yep, and I love Kirby's cool machines! Once while my ex-wife and I were writing a comic, I described a splash panel as "A Jack Kirby Nerdgasm" because I wanted everything—helicarriers, helicopter flying packs, big hovertanks, pulse rifles, the lot. My ex said, "You didn't leave any room for the characters", and I was all, "Who needs them? We had them in the last panel!"
That could be one reason we're no longer married....
I liked THE ETERNALS more than you did (I felt hiring Chloe Zhao as a director forced Marvel to go outside, and not only rely on Cincinnati and green screen), but—yeah, its big issue was, as you say, how reductive The Trolley Problem is. Jack Kirby tried to "go deep", and the results were laughably juvenile and have dated badly, because he embraced the philosophical side of Sixties counterculture like it was a red sports car or hair plugs.
Not that I think Kirby was being shallow—I only wish he had been (as Stan Lee was later, chasing after "hipness" and the Sexual Revolution like a dirty old man!). Instead, he ran wholeheartedly into the more cosmic mindset of the time, developing the Fourth World saga (NEW GODS, MISTER MIRACLE, THE FOREVER PEOPLE) for DC (which is where the DCEU got Steppenwolf and Darkseid), aspects of which he revisited with THE ETERNALS for Marvel. He wanted audiences to take what he was doing seriously, and those fans who have championed Kirby's work did—unfortunately, like Carlos Castañeda, Harlan Ellison, or Ayn Rand, his ideas were Deep on the Surface, and if you dug underneath them you found there wasn't all that much there.
Yeah...there are fans and scholars who will try to argue that Kirby's late work had intellectual depth, but it always seemed like his genius was in drawing monsters and cool machines, not in philosophizing.
Yep, and I love Kirby's cool machines! Once while my ex-wife and I were writing a comic, I described a splash panel as "A Jack Kirby Nerdgasm" because I wanted everything—helicarriers, helicopter flying packs, big hovertanks, pulse rifles, the lot. My ex said, "You didn't leave any room for the characters", and I was all, "Who needs them? We had them in the last panel!"
That could be one reason we're no longer married....
Making an entire movie out of a trolley problem was certainly...a choice.