Eternals (2021)
dir. Chloé Zhao
Rated: PG-13
image: ©2021 Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures
Marvel Cinematic Universe mastermind Kevin Feige’s style and design for the look and feel of the content he produces for his Disney overlords has calcified with his latest entry, Eternals. I use the dreaded word content – it’s a word that makes me throw up in my mouth a little; it’s more at home in a marketing meeting than discussions about art or entertainment – because that’s what Eternals feels like, rather than a story or a movie.
At an interminable 157 minutes, it’s an attempt at entertainment that bolsters Martin Scorsese’s assertion that Marvel movies are more theme park attraction than storytelling. Even as a 200-million-dollar rollercoaster, Eternals is lifeless and largely joyless. The only fun thing about it is a few of the performances where a human spark peaks through the calculatedness of it all.
I’m laying authorship for Eternals at Feige’s feet. Despite director Chloé Zhao’s delicate filmmaking style and empathetic storytelling in films like The Rider and the beautiful and moving Nomadland, her personal aesthetic is swallowed whole by the MCU house-style in Eternals. Other than a few fleeting moments featuring one of her signature camera moves – in which her camera, at a remove, almost documentary style, follows behind characters as they walk – anyone could have made this movie.
Themes like empathy and compassion are present, likely because of Zhao’s contribution to the screenplay, which she wrote in collaboration with Patrick Burleigh, Ryan Firpo, and Kaz Firpo, from an original story by the Firpo cousins. Those explorations are made incidental, though, by the usual MCU pablum and deadening action sequences that come along like clockwork every 25 minutes or so.
In the post-End Game MCU, after meeting Thanos, who gained the power to obliterate half the population of the universe – that is before the inevitable reset button is pressed – we learn at the beginning of Eternals that there are beings infinitely more powerful than Thanos could ever hope to be.
(The MCU is getting into a real “it’s turtles all the way down” situation. Each time I watch an MCU movie now, I’m acutely aware that none of what I’m seeing probably matters much; a bigger threat is always one movie away.)
Billions of years ago, the omniscient Celestials, led by the all-powerful Arishem – an analogue to the Christian deity Yahweh – wanted to create intelligent life (like humans) in the universe. As a means of helping it develop, Arishem created the Deviants to prey on apex predators, like the ones found on earth.
Like Yahweh, somehow the omnipotent Arishem failed to see that his plan was flawed. (One of the most unsatisfying things about Eternals is that it’s essentially an allegory about an allegory, but with nothing interesting to say about its source material.) In a misuse of the concept of evolution that would make Charles Darwin cry, we learn that the Deviants on earth evolved to hunt humans in addition to their intended prey.
In order to cull the Deviant population so that humans might thrive, Arishem created the Eternals. They were instructed to protect humans from Deviants, but not to interfere in any other human conflict. That tidy bit of storytelling immediately shuts down the obvious questions about why the Eternals didn’t lift a finger against Thanos or any of the other existential threats humanity has faced in the MCU. The explanation comes after a character raises that very issue, as a surrogate for the audience.
Arishem, we learn, has a hidden plan for humanity. The reveal, which makes writing a spoiler-free review tricky, comes near the mid-point of the picture. It’s obliquely referenced in the movie’s trailer as the Emergence, so that’s all I’ll mention as well.
In what is my wife’s least-favorite trope of MCU fare, our heroes spend the bulk of the movie squabbling amongst themselves. Should they go along with Arishem’s plan or defy their maker? (The internecine strife has definite Captain America: Civil War vibes.) Our ten heroes, Ajak, Sersi, Ikaris, Kingo, Sprite, Phastos, Makkari, Druig, Gilgamesh, and Thena, split up in 1521, after killing what they thought was the last Deviant on earth. They are forbidden from returning to their home planet, Olympia, until Arishem gives them further instructions. In 2021, the Eternals must find each other again when a Deviant attacks, killing one of their own.
Instead of using something like an inventive mystery scenario, where one Eternal must play sleuth to find the others, the co-writers settled on a structure that is straightforward and rather bland. The immortal beings reassemble one by one as helpful (and, more often than not, boring) flashbacks from the team’s past exploits fill us in on their intrapersonal dynamics.
Sersi and Ikaris were madly in love half a millennium ago, but have drifted apart. Kingo presides over a Bollywood-adjacent media empire. Druig, who can control the minds of others, is determined to intervene in humanity’s inclination to slaughter one another. He has set himself up as a god in a closed society where peace reigns.
Druig’s path, and the event that precipitates it, is the worst example of trivializing real-world suffering and trauma for Marvel world-building. In the sequence set in 1521, after the Eternals have killed what they think is the last Deviant, our heroes witness Spanish conquistadors massacring an indigenous tribe. It feels cheap, demeaning, and a little slimy for the MCU to use a genocide as a backdrop for a rollicking good superhero action-adventure movie.
Ditto the explanation about where these new Deviants have come from. It seems that global warming – the biggest existential crisis that real, actual humanity has ever faced – has melted glaciers that kept some of the ancient Deviants locked in ice. It’s an unsettling feeling to realize that a bajillion-dollar entertainment monopoly is using two incredibly complex, divisive topics of our modern era, climate change and the legacy of colonialist-driven subjugation and murder, as window dressing for their superhero smash-‘em-up.
There are elements within Eternals worthy of praise. I was on board with most of the performances. Particularly noteworthy is Gemma Chan as Sersi. Chan has a quiet strength as Sersi that translates to a calming effect, contrasting nicely with all the chaos. Kumail Nanjiani as Kingo is fun as the primary comic relief in the movie, although most of his comedic bits, which he shares with Kingo’s valet character, Karun, fall flat. (I would be PISSED if I trained as hard as Nanjiani did on his physique for the film. His arms – which, to be fair, look like they’re cut from marble – are about the only thing he gets to show off in Eternals.)
Sixteen-year-old Lia McHugh gives pathos to Sprite, the only Eternal perpetually stuck in a kid’s body.
Brian Tyree Henry is fun and funny as Phastos, an Eternal obsessed with inventions who helps humans in their technological advances. (Eternals is essentially Marvel’s take on the done-to-death sci-fi (and wild-eyed conspiracy theory “documentary”) subgenre of ancient aliens.)
Angelina Jolie and Salma Hayek show up for what were presumably tidy little paychecks as Eternals Thena and Ajak, respectively. Thena suffers from a plot device, sorry, psychological condition known as Mahd Wy'ry, which causes her to become confused and to attack her teammates. The bond that Thena forms with Eternal Gilgamesh is one of the most moving relationships of the movie, due in no small part to Don Lee’s tender performance as Gilgamesh, which is the actor’s Hollywood debut.
Richard Madden – aka Robb Stark – is dour and overly serious as Ikaris. The conflict between Ikaris and most of the other Eternals late in the film is never earned. Two of the characters go out of their way during the climax to remark how much they’ve been looking forward to battling their comrade, but Eternals, over the course of its 2.5+ hours, never builds the dynamic that would justify that payoff.
The visual effects in Eternals are about what you’d expect. They look good in an if-anything-is-possible-everything-looks-mundane kind of way. In one of the dozen-or-so dull action set pieces, a CGI bus is upended, Christopher Nolan style, only to be turned, by Sersi, into a million CGI pixels approximating flower petals. The tactility and immediacy of the same stunt in The Dark Knight – staged practically, with an 18-wheeler – is immeasurably more effective in that movie than what’s achieved here.
Eternals didn’t make me care for what was happening on screen or almost any of its characters. It’s a slog to get through, and even if I were an A#1 fan of Marvel’s output, this is an entry I wouldn’t be eager to revisit.
Why it got 2.5 stars:
- There was no one more excited than me about Chloé Zhao directing an MCU movie. But I can barely see her in this thing. I think that’s what disappointed me most of all. From now on, let Michael Bay direct the rest of the MCU movies. I want the Chloé Zhaos of the world making deeply felt, socially probing, human cinema experiences.
Things I forgot to mention in my review, because, well, I'm the Forgetful Film Critic:
- Shout out to whoever made the decision (I’m assuming it was Zhao?) to start the movie with Pink Floyd’s Time. Best band ever created. No discussion.
- Also, shout out to Marvel giving us the MCU’s first deaf superhero. Lauren Ridloff is great as Makkari, although she isn’t given much to do. Then again, that’s the general feeling you get from all the characters, even the most consequential ones. There are just so damn many of them, you never really get to see any of them shine.
- Pretty sure this entire movie was an excuse to get Kit Harington to say the words, "I love you, Sersi." It's not the same spelling, I know, but still...
- One of the funniest/most maddening pretzel logic explanations from Christians about what happens when they go to heaven made it’s way into Eternals. When confronted with the assumed horror it would be for a Christian to know a non-Christian loved one is being mercilessly tortured for all eternity in hell, one Christian responded by saying that God would essentially perform a memory wipe, so that all those conflicted feelings would disappear. So, you know, by that Christian’s reckoning, God is a sci-fi writer. That’s the solution the Eternals come up with to cure Thena of her Mahd Wy'ry. “Your spirit will remain,” is what she’s told when they contemplate erasing all her memories.
- One non-Christian sentiment I enjoyed was the idea that once their mission is complete, these immortal beings must “find [their] own purpose.” As an atheist, I believe there is no meaning to life other than what we give it. The movie doesn’t really explore this idea though; it’s only mentioned in passing.
Close encounters with people in movie theaters:
- Seen at Alamo Drafthouse with a fairly full house.
CORRECTION: In the original version of this review, I mistakenly stated that the indigenous tribe that the conquistadors were attacking in 1521 were in South America. They were, in fact, in the capital of the Aztec people, Tenochtitlan, in what is now Mexico, located in North America. I deeply regret the error.