For those who have multiple families, well, I guess you do choose the one you like best and then you're on a business trip for the other one. But that's not a lot of people.
Of course, it's not actually Valentine's Day in the movie Eternity, it was only Valentine's Day when I watched it. And I had to choose to watch it over the other movie I planned to watch, which wouldn't have had a Valentine's Day theme at all. But when my wife and I finally watched the first episode of Pluribus with our dinner, that brought me on to AppleTV+, where I was reminded that Eternity is an Apple movie and it's only just been released on their streaming platform -- in time for Valentine's Day, of course. Whenever possible, I do enjoy a themed viewing.
Pluribus was our only joint viewing last night. While my wife and I do sometimes watch a movie together on Valentine's Day, and it even sometimes has a romantic plot, it's not expected or even typical. You see, we don't really celebrate Valentine's Day in our house. Not that we've never celebrated it, but when we did, mostly in our earlier years, it was more for my benefit than for hers. See, her birthday is only five days later, and she is even more opposed to the tacky commercialism around Valentine's Day than I am. Americans are raised with a tolerance for this sort of thing; Australians, at least some Australians, are not.
And this year, there was a reason we weren't doing anything at all to acknowledge the holiday, but it's not something I need to get into right now. I'll just say it doesn't have anything to do with our relationship. It's external to that.
Anyway. Let's discuss the movie.
David Freyne's film was my biggest accessible regret before my 2025 rankings closed. I could have seen it in the theater before that deadline, but I just couldn't make it work, in part because of the same unnamed thing that's been going on with our family for the past couple months.
But I generally love movies with high concepts and movies involving the afterlife. One of my favorites, to which this bears more than a passing resemblance, is Albert Brooks' Defending Your Life. I had high hopes for a movie in which an elderly woman dies of cancer, and then in the afterlife has to choose whether to spend eternity with the husband of 65 years who died just a little bit before her while choking on a pretzel, or the husband who died 67 years earlier in the Korean war. She wasn't "unfaithful" to either of them in life because she was single when she met and married both of them, but now she's got a dilemma.
The husband she lost in the 1950s represented only young love and endless possibility. He was handsome and charming. The husband she had for 65 years after that was a person whose every wart she learned over a lifetime of everything life throws at you. You could see why she might not want to spend a literal eternity with him after spending a figurative eternity with him on Earth. But also, she doesn't really even know the husband she lost 67 years earlier because they only had a couple years together and it was all unrealized promise.
It's a more interesting dilemma than it is an interesting movie. I'm giving Eternity a marginal thumbs up, but I was more conscious of its missed opportunities than I was of its successful execution of the central dilemma. I was also really conscious of the earthbound nature of the sets. There are a few scenes that give us something with a true afterlife vibe, but I was continually noticing how most of the scenes were likely just shot in a hotel hallway somewhere. Maybe it would have been too much of a distraction, and problematic in a different way, to have the whole thing look like Pixar's Soul -- not to mention costly, which is likely the most relevant factor. But in a movie like this, you want to think more about the heavens than you think about Courtyard by Marriott.
I think the movie probably did not want to wrestle with its more interesting existential concept, which it introduces as "the void." As lovely as some of the eternities appear to be -- and you can choose from multiple packages like you were choosing a vacation -- they are a single, final choice, so you have to select them carefully. If you try to escape from your eternity to get into another one, well, there's a small chance you'll succeed. But the greater chance is that they'll catch you and send you off to the void: which is just blackness for eternity, the closest thing to hell that exists.
Unless you are inclined to believe in heaven, we mostly think of death as a light being switched off and an end to consciousness. You're no more conscious of the time after death than you were conscious of the time before you were born. This film posits a potential eternal consciousness of nothingness, which indeed would make someone insane pretty quickly. But the film doesn't really go there. It doesn't show us this, only suggests that it exists.
For reasons that I again won't go into -- but I've hinted enough at them that you might be starting to guess them -- Eternity was actually the most thematically appropriate film I could have watched on Saturday night, having nothing to do with Valentine's Day and having everything to do with early February 2026. Death was on my mind. And even though Eternity didn't grapple with it in as satisfying a fashion as I might have liked, any grappling with death is helpful in terms of coming to grips with it, and getting closure with it, in our own minds.
On that cheery note, Happy Valentine's Day, for what remains of it in your time zone.
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