Richard Madden and Gemma Chan in a scene from “Eternals,” (2021)

This is not your typical Marvel movie. “Eternals” delves more into the emotional impact of character choices and relies more on dialogue than running from fight to fight to fight. But it does it by drawing out conversations and scenes too long with little action to move the plot along, making its two-and-a-half hour run time drag and leaving most of the story forgotten days later.

It’s not unusual in the MCU to see an indie filmmaker or a director that has no direct experience with these kinds of movies. In fact, it’s kind of Marvel’s modus operandi, and largely it works out for the best.

With this latest installment in the franchise’s behemoth catalogue of stories, “Eternals” pairs Chloe Zhao, this year’s Oscar-winner for “Nomadland,” with the monumental task of bringing the stories of the 10 beings known as the Eternals to the silver screen.

The film follows these 10 ethereal, immortal beings from their placement on Earth at the behest of the creator of the universe, Arisham (voiced by David Kaye), to rid the world of fearsome creatures called Deviants.

After the crew killed all the Deviants, they awaited further orders from Arisham. In the meantime, over thousands of years, they lived among humans, but never interfered in major conflicts or helped when bad things such as war, famine, Thanos, etc., happened. In the present day, all members of the group have gone their separate ways, and we find Sersi (Gemma Chan) and Sprite (Lia McHugh) living in London.

One night, after a global earthquake, the two, along with Sersi’s boyfriend Dane Whitman (Kit Harrington), are confronted by a Deviant. Sprite and Sersi must reveal their abilities in order to fight the creature, and are then aided by Ikaris (Richard Madden), who, coincidentally, is Sersi’s ex.

The three Eternals travel to South Dakota to find their leader Ajak (Salma Hayek) to try and find answers as to why all of a sudden a Deviant on the loose, and to figure out how this one’s powers are different. When they arrive on her farm, Ajak has been killed. They then decide to find the rest of the Eternals and fight back against the Deviants. Along the way, they find their mission is bigger than they’d anticipated.

The film fills in the time between the Eternals’ arrival on Earth and the present day with long, drawn out flashback scenes that wreck the pacing. The upside is that we do get a more detailed insight into all these immortal beings, with a special focus on Sersi and Ikaris, but without a really gripping, core emotional arc.

I would much rather have had more on Gilgamesh and Thena’s (Don Lee and Angelina Jolie) friendship or of Phastos’ (Brian Tyree Henry) life of domesticity than the former’s romance.

With so much more of an emotionally driven plot than typical MCU movies to date, it devotes most of its overlong runtime to dialogue and seems to shirk most of the action that you would expect to see in this kind of movie. Even when there are action scenes, and they are well choreographed, something always seems a little off about them.

One main takeaway that led to this being more lackluster than more recent MCU offerings is that in most of these stories that center around gods, aliens or other otherworldly beings, is that we usually have a vessel the audience can connect to in order to immerse ourselves in the world: With “Guardians of the Galaxy,” we have Peter Quill. In “Thor,” we have Jane Foster, and even in “Captain Marvel” we have Nick Fury.

Our “Eternals” vessel, Dane Whitman, is there for about five minutes at the beginning of the film, then we don’t hear or see him again until the end (which, props to Harrington — he managed to squeeze enough out of the short amount of screen time to pique my interest as to his character’s next big move).

It’s not all disappointing, though. Zhao brings her usual beautiful filming style, with Director of Photography Ben Davis opting for filming on location rather than on a sound stage, in most cases, allowing the beauty of the natural world to shine, as opposed to the usual over reliance on computer graphics in these movies.

And it cannot be overstated how great it is to see the kind of on-screen representation there is in “Eternals.” It is wonderful to see so many Black and brown faces, and the LGBTQ and deaf communities represented, without being forced, in a comic book movie.

It’s just too bad that it took this long to happen — in a film that could have been better.

“Eternals”

Rated PG-13

157 minutes

2.5 stars