Eternals is a strange choice for a Marvel movie, at least in comparison with what the MCU has produced. The closest comp the movie has in the MCU is the early Thor movies, so, you know, not a great selling point, being among the worst of Marvel’s offerings. But hey, they got Chloe Zhao, the most recent Best Director winner at the Oscars, to make it. That’s got to make the movie something special right? Well, poor Zhao, like Kenneth Branagh before her, learns that sometimes your style and the MCU formula struggle to mesh in a wholly satisfying way.
Way before Tony Stark started building his first Iron Man costume, in 5000 BC, a celestial being named Arishem sent a group of Eternals, god like beings, down to Earth. Their mission: combat the deviants, a group of miscreant creatures intent on feeding on humans, but to not interfere in human activity otherwise. Over the course of centuries, Eternals Sersi (Gemma Chan), Ikaris (Richard Madden), Thena (Angelina Jolie), Kingo (Kumail Nanjiani), Sprite (Lia McHugh), Phastos (Brian Tyree Henry), Makkari (Lauren Ridloff), Druig (Barry Keoghan) and Gilgamesh (Don Lee) are led by Ajak (Salma Hayek) to complete their mission and eliminate all deviants from Earth, waiting to hear from Arishem when the time is right to return back home.
Let’s just get this out of the way at the start: Eternals doesn’t really fit into MCU’s moneymaking storytelling formula at all. This is an expressive, languid film about gods trying to figure out what to use their powers for: a more Zack Snydery story than anything else. The only elements of MCU’s quippiness are far and fleeting, mostly in the hands of Kumail Nanjiani and Harish Patel, Kingo’s friend. So you can see why a nervious Marvel might want to bring in Zhao, who specializes in films like this. But Marvel was always going to dominate the storytelling war (they’ve got Phase 4 to consider), meaning we only get the technical parts of what makes Zhao’s films so special. Eternals is awash in beautiful imagery of planets, nature, humanity, etc, providing the epic scope necessary in storytelling for gods. Eternals’s story isn’t really that interesting or relatable, so Zhao does her best to manufacture stakes amid a series of internal struggles of elite gods that Marvel gave her to figure out.
So how does Zhao do that? By making unfeeling gods learn what it is like to be a human. Marvel now has its first sex scene (chaste, but you have to start somewhere right?), and really attempts to show love its many forms: we get unrequited love, interrracial love, LGBTQ love (another first), love lost, intergalactic love, you get the idea. There’s also humanity’s proclivity for violence. Zhao uses that aspect of humans to create friction between the Eternals: some condescendingly look at the naivete of Earth’s population, and others want to help step in and provide wisdom and guidance to help progress the planet forward, using famous world events to teach these lessons. These moments of Eternals becoming more human and less godlike are the best parts of the movie, showcasing humanity at its horrifying worst and diverse, wonderful best driving the conflict between the Eternal’s struggle with their mission objective.
Eternals is a sobering reminder that 2 movie rights can make a wrong sometimes. And yet, the movie is not without its bright spots, pushing Marvel into stranger, uncharted directions, one in particular mid credits scene will draw giddy glee from a section of the MCU fans. Plus, you’ll snicker like I did every time at Marvel’s casting of 2 Game of Thrones men vying for the love and affection of Sersi.