Eternals – Review

Eternals

Directed by: Chloé Zhao

Runtime: 156 minutes

Sometimes art imitates life in ways that are both fascinating and unintentional. There’s a moment in Eternals where the titular alien superhero team are quite literally at each other’s throats. After their arrival in ancient Mesopotamia several thousand years ago, we’re shown a group of benevolent and immortal protectors created by the god-like Celestials that have (mostly) lived out their lives in secret, guarding Earth and protecting humanity from a ravaging race of alien creatures known as Deviants that feed off intelligent life. During a flashback to the Battle of Tenochtitlán in 16th-century Aztec Mexico, Thena (Angelina Jolie), an elite warrior who conjures staffs, shields and swords out of cosmic energy, suddenly cracks from an onset of “Mahd Wy’ry” (pronounced “mad weary”) and turns on her fellow heroes.

Earlier, the group’s leader and maternal figurehead Ajak (Salma Hayek) describes how this affliction is the result of living through millennium after millennium and the presence of too many memories—too many faces, too many stories—and it’s only Thena’s centuries-long attachment to the burly Gilgamesh (Don Lee) that manages to bring her back from this cognitive abyss. And it was at this point—roughly a third of the way through the 26th instalment in the ever-expanding, multi-billion-dollar blockbuster juggernaut that is the 13-year-old MCU—where I realized that, in some ways, we’re all a little mad weary.

Watching a new Marvel film is to—subconsciously or otherwise—feel the oppressive weight of an endless assembly line of aggressively poll-tested media properties, populated by big-name film heroes, peripheral side characters, team-up ensembles, and TV spin-offs, alongside their various interconnected narrative ephemera and obligatory post-credit teasers. Watching a new Marvel film in 2021 practically demands one’s eventual capitulation to the usurious consumption of the MCU’s corporate Uni-Mind. It’s almost enough to make even the most non-serious cinema lover crack. To paraphrase MCU super-fan Martin Scorsese: “We are all Thena.”

Fundamentally, the plot of Eternals hinges on the love story between Sersi (Gemma Chan), who is compassionate towards humans and can manipulate matter, and Ikaris (Richard Madden), a detached strongman and Superman-analogue who can fly and shoot beams of cosmic energy from his eyes. A century after Ikaris left unannounced, Sersi is posing as a museum curator in London and living with the child-like, old-soul Sprite (Lia McHugh), who can manifest life-like illusions, while also dating human Dane Whitman (Kit Harington). However, their idyllic existence is soon interrupted by mega-earthquakes and the return of the Deviants, who now seem stronger and dangerously self-aware. This resurgence kicks off a global quest to reunite the Eternals after centuries of being apart and put a stop to their enemy for good.

To the film’s credit, it represents another attempt within the MCU top brass to try something different—or different-adjacent at the very least. Phase 3 of the franchise saw the inclusion of entries that departed ever so slightly from overlord Kevin Feige’s winning formula: the psychedelic magic realism of Scott Derrickson’s Doctor Strange (2016), Taika Waititi’s irreverent sci-fi romp, Thor: Ragnarök (2017), and the bold Afro-futurism of Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther (2018). Following a brief pandemic pause, this trend continued in earnest with Phase 4, as indie filmmakers Cate Shortland and Destin Daniel Cretton were allowed to helm Black Widow (2021) and Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (2021) respectively, with each embracing their various backgrounds and idiosyncrasies.

It’s in this frame of mind that Chinese-born writer and director Chloé Zhao comes to a globe-striding, star-studded property like Eternals. Much has been made in the press and the film’s questionable marketing of Zhao’s high-profile Oscar win for Best Director and Best Picture with 2020’s Nomadland, not to mention her eclectic grab-bag of stylistic influences, including the pseudoscience documentary series Ancient Aliens, the Final Fantasy video game series, historian Yuval Noah Harari’s book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, and the work of visionary director Terrence Malick. And yet, while Marvel may have bet on the transitive property of having an Oscar winner in the director’s chair, Eternals is a film that constantly strains and buckles under the weight of its own expansive mythology.

While Zhao might be known for her formidable restraint and humanistic approach to filmmaking, almost none of that patience and emotional heft is present in Eternals and its bloated two-and half-hour runtime. For every frame that delicately lingers on sunlight piercing through clasped hands or sweeping landscape vistas, there’s a frenetic, CG-heavy action set-piece or a dialogue exchange peppered with winking soy banter. And truthfully, this is all to be expected. Eternals is an origin story about ten alien superheroes and two new villains spanning thousands of years of in-universe history. It’s a near miracle that Zhao manages to wring any level of coherence out of a premise so jumbled and overblown.

The film’s main issue then comes down to the level of story and the contingency of slotting the Eternals into the already crowded MCU lore. While Eternals zeroes in on the relationship between Sersi and Ikaris to generate character drama and narrative stakes, it does so at the detriment of the team’s other members. Some, like the telepathic Druig (Barry Keoghan), lightning-quick speedster Makkari (Lauren Ridloff), and hyper-intelligent inventor Phastos (Brian Tyree Henry), pass through the film so casually that their absence from generous portions of the film’s runtime is noticeable and left largely unexplained. Another curious flaw is that Zhao’s film plays things mostly straight and serious, with only the sardonic Kingo (Kumail Nanjiani), an Eternal moonlighting as an ageless Bollywood megastar, and his plucky manager Karun (Harish Patel) providing brief moments of levity and comic relief.

As Eternals barrels into plot points with little time to recover and reset, attentive viewers might start to question where this group of over-powered heroes have been this whole time, particularly during the events of Phase 3’s devastating Infinity War. While Harrington’s Whitman does land on this very reasonable query within the film’s first 15 minutes, the answers that follow are glancingly unsatisfactory at best and thematically inconsistent at worst. The paternalistic purpose of the Eternals appears to hinge on ethical questions of loyalty, agency and determinism, yet Zhao ultimately fails to confront or subvert these ideas in a way that feels compelling or earned, instead choosing to rush into a clumsy third act resolution that (surprise!) only serves to set up more film entries to follow.

Overall, Eternals is a muddled misfire of cosmic proportions and a welcome reminder that Feige & Co are only human after all. In future, Marvel would do well to acknowledge that ambition does not always equate to adoration, and even sure things can struggle from problems of scale.