Eternals is not terrible, contrary to what some critics say.
But it does try to make the MCU too big too quickly.
The Short Take:
Straining under the weight of its own ambitious storytelling, Chloe Zhao’s Eternals buries compelling new characters beneath a clunky, exposition-heavy script. There’s still a lot to like, and I’m open to a sequel.
The Long Take:
[Note: This will be a spoiler-free review until the end, at which point I will give a full warning.]
Until the initial round of mixed reviews began to trickle in a few weeks ago, I was very much looking forward to this film. Director Chloe Zhao, hot off her Best Picture and Best Director Oscar wins for Nomadland, said in interviews that she had pitched the film to MCU mastermind Kevin Feige by reciting a William Blake poem. I did not have any preconceived notions about The Eternals as heroes, having never heard of them before. So, as a prospect, Eternals was brimming with fresh perspective and potential: take a chance on a filmmaker with a non-blockbuster resume to tell a huge, cosmic story that could help expand the MCU, in a style unlike anything we’d seen before.
I don’t regret seeing Eternals; in fact, I quite enjoyed much of it. Ultimately, though, what it tries to do doesn’t work. But before I get into my criticisms, many of which I share with other critics, I want to highlight what I liked, and what makes me willing to, despite the issues of this first film, give Eternals 2 (in the event that it happens) a shot.
Considering this film introduced me to a dozen new characters, I was astonished at how quickly and how much I liked many of them. I would credit the diverse and star-powered cast with most of that. Gemma Chan, who actually played a Kree in Captain Marvel but is more well known for Crazy Rich Asians, carries this movie with grace and sincerity. As a result of her performance here, I would watch her as the lead in any film.
Angelina Jolie, in comparison, has a much smaller role, but I couldn’t get enough of her as Thena. Oozing with movie stardom, she filled every frame with her power and magnetism, while also giving a fairly complex performance. Her character had the most inner conflict: Thena was once the most formidable and revered warrior Eternal, but now struggles with her limitations (I’m being purposely vague here to avoid spoilers). Showing pain, vulnerability, and strength, I thought she did so much with what little she had. I’d also like more movies where she’s just owning her opponents in a fight, please. Similarly, Brian Tyree Henry stands out despite very little screen time. He grounded the film in his more relatable, human performance. Even though there are more conventional audience avatars in the film (Kingo’s human valet and Sersi’s boyfriend, played by Kit Harrington), he kept the other characters in check and reminded me of the stakes for humanity more.
I most want to give Kumail Nanjiani’s Kingo his own Disney+ series, though. He was incredibly funny, often injecting much-needed levity into scenes, and his reveal in the present day may have been my single most joyful viewing moment. The expressions on his face as he dances towards the camera were so, so charming. Can you imagine getting that on a weekly basis? (I can.)
Image Credit: Insider
The Eternals as a group of heroes released endorphins in the comic book nerd quadrant of my brain, and based on what I’ve read and listened to so far, that seems to largely have gotten lost in the conversation. Each Eternal has a unique skill, and some of them are very cool: Sersi (Gemma Chan) can transmute matter, Druig can control minds, Ajak can heal, Ikaris can fly and shoot laser beams from his eyes, and Makkari can run at light speed. (If you are also making comparisons to certain DC characters, know that I couldn’t help but do the same. I didn’t say these were original powers, but they’re still cool.) And Zhao focuses on their interpersonal drama, which made them feel like a friend circle that has spent too long together and, in some cases, grown apart. A lot of critics have called the film hollow and stiff, with no emotion. I flat out don’t agree with that. While the performances do have more of a Shakespearean gravitas/stoicism to them, I felt for most (not all, but most) of these characters and their “family” drama. Love, lust, jealousy, anger, friendship, betrayal, shifting allegiances, competitiveness, and ego-driven resentment — it’s all there and it made me want to invest time in these god-like figures, who, honestly, should have felt more aloof and distant than they did.
If only their creators had invested more time in telling their story more gradually. I fully agree with critics who call the structure of this film messy, bloated, and poorly-paced. The moment a lengthy and convoluted opening crawl appeared, I suspected we were in for a movie burdened by the scope and scale of its story. And how right I was. There is far too much exposition that slows the plot down. There are too many flashbacks, to the point where I started to question whether or not we could actually still classify them as flashbacks. Perhaps, I thought, this is just one long narrative chopped up into bits and shuffled?
To be fair, the very premise of this film presents an enormous challenge. The Eternals arrive on Earth at the dawn of human civilization, sent on a mission to gently guide humanity through its development by fighting off these sinewy, sometimes big cat-looking sometimes dinosaur-looking creatures called the Deviants. Over time, each of the Eternals form their own moral stances on how and how much powerful cosmic beings should interfere in the lives of humans as they watch them suffer through wars and natural disasters. This creates a problem because in order to develop the Eternals as characters (which, if you’ll recall, I liked), Zhao needs to tell their story not over the course of a human lifetime but upwards of 7000 years. If there’s an ancient civilization you learned about in your high school world history class, it’s likely in this film for a few minutes. Like a rock skipping across a pond, Zhao hops across eras of time to establish not only how long these guardians — who never age — have lived, but how long they have known each other. (Again, a quality I liked.)
But there was no need to show us the entirety of that history. The first line in the film is literally “in the beginning…” Why did we need to start there and ploddingly zig and zag through time for two hours and 37 minutes? For years, I’ve been telling my first year college students to avoid starting their essays with, “Since the dawn of time” or “over the course of human history” because it’s too broad a generalization to be meaningful; the bigger the breadth, the less the depth of their ideas. But how else could Zhao and the screenwriters have convinced us that the Eternals, who otherwise look human, were grander and wiser than the rest of us? I don’t have a great answer to that question, but I think a little more trust in the audience would have helped. MCU fans are ready and willing to believe anything you show us, basically. A talking duck named Howard randomly shows up in shows and films and we just roll with it. I think we could have handled more passing references to events of the past (both historical and personal) rather than relying on choppy scenes that constantly use establishing text like “Mesopotamia 5000 BC.” Several of these scenes from ancient times prompted me to wonder if whatever we were learning about the characters could have been more efficiently conveyed in a present day conversation.
I can’t help but compare Eternals to Dune, and not only because they were released within weeks of one another. They are both sprawling epic science fiction stories with a mostly serious tone. Only Dune, as I discuss in my review, is a breathtaking success, while Eternals could not handle the task its creators set out to do. The way in which Denis Villeneuve conveyed heaps of information moved the story forward rather than held it back. It was, as some complained, only half a movie, though. Eternals, then, is perhaps a cautionary tale for those who wanted Dune Part One to cover the entirety of Herbert’s novel.
[SPOILER ALERT: I’m going to shift to picking apart parts of the plot and then discussing the two end credit scenes, so if you haven’t seen the film yet or didn’t catch the stingers when you did, come back later when you’ve caught up.]
Last chance….
This isn’t an original take by any means, but I subscribe to the theory that Eternals would have been much better as a serialized show. That would have given us enough time to devote an entire episode to individual or pairs of Eternals, the flashbacks wouldn’t be as disruptive, and we could build towards some of the plot points that I found hurried or minimized in the film. Season 1 could be the mystery with the Deviants returning and acting differently than they have in the past. Ajak’s murder could be an early episode catalyst for an investigation that carries on throughout the season, with clues every few episodes. And Ikaris’ ultimate reveal as her murderer, working against the other Eternals the entire time, could be a Season 1 cliffhanger. Gradually learning what the Eternals learn via breadcrumbs seems so much more thrilling than just having that bomb dropped on us 2/3 of the way through the film. Or, as Joanna Robinson suggested on The Big Picture podcast, letting the audience in on the secret before the rest of the characters to create suspense and dramatic irony would have been great too. The Celestials seem a lot like The Timekeepers in Loki, initially shrouded in mystery with unclear motivations; I think they could have served as a similar plot device in a serialized format. Season 2 could then follow the Eternals rallying together and formulating a plan to save Earth from the Emergence, ending with an action-packed finale where Sersi levels up her powers to turn Tiamut into a marble statue.
The expansive ground that the film tries to cover in one installment, rather than a series of episodes, inevitably cuts some of the myth-making short. It’s still unclear to me, for example, why only one Deviant was trying to suck out the powers of each Eternal, evolving into a semi-sentient being in the process. Or what significance that had for the larger story. The Deviants’ role in all this and their motivations was pretty fuzzy to me the entire time. The rules about what kind of matter Sersi could transmute when was also confusing, because they made a point to explain that she couldn’t transmute living matter, but then she’s changing something into a flock of birds. I know her powers evolved over time, but the how and why of it all was not clear. I’m not the type of moviegoer who picks apart the plausibility of every little thing. In fact, I’m fairly forgiving of plot holes, or, more accurately, I’m more than willing to suspend my disbelief and hand wave whatever I need to in order to experience a story in which I’m interested. But, like Mallory Rubin of The Ringerverse podcast, I insist on a consistent, sustainable internal logic that I can explain to someone else.
What’s more, I don’t think that Deviants are really going to make a dent in the MCU going forward. Kevin Feige had teased that Eternals would be a game changer for the MCU, and with other properties leaning more multiversal, a more cosmic-focused story seemed appropriate to launch us into the stratosphere. This film doesn’t seem very “plugged in” or related to much else we’ve since in Phase Four, though. In fact, it has a very retrofitted feel. The film makes references to the Avengers, Thanos, and the Snap, but since they were absent for the entire Infinity Saga, and the explanation is that they were ordered to not interfere in non-Deviant-related human conflict, their appearance now seems somewhat inconsequential. I’d love to be proven wrong, of course.
[Just checking to make sure you’ve seen the two end credit scenes before we go any further. You have been warned.]
The two end credit scenes, in fact, don’t even seem to relate all that much to any of the Disney+ shows, Black Widow’s Yelena, Shang-Chi, or what’s been teased about the next MCU film, Spider-man: No Way Home. The first introduces Eros, Thanos’ brother, who will be played by One Direction teenybopper sensation Harry Styles. But his conversation with the remaining Eternals seems pretty focused on going out and finding the other Eternals (which would be what a potential sequel would cover, right?). And while I complained that I didn’t get enough Kit Harrington in this movie (by a mile), his stinger teased his upcoming appearance as the Black Knight. But…it seems like he’s going to be a part of the upcoming Blade film rather than any entry into the multiversal wars that have been foreshadowed. How do I know that? Both Chloe Zhao and Kumail Nanjiani have confirmed that it’s Mahershala Ali’s voice that we hear mysteriously speaking to Harrington’s Dane Whitman at the very end. So Eternals as an indirect vehicle for producing more spin-off MCU content? Yes. But as a consequential moving part of Phase Four as we understand it so far? Not really.
In spite of all its issues, I sincerely hope this does well at the box office because I want Marvel/Disney to keep experimenting, to keep taking chances. The MCU can only maintain its pop culture king status if it finds a way to push out of its comfort zone and evolve. I can’t fault Chloe Zhao and this film for trying to do that.