Review: Eternals (2021)
Not a home run, but interesting and entertaining
You might have heard that Eternals is the first MCU movie with a ‘rotten’ rating on review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes. This baffles me, to be honest, and will in part be because of the nature of aggregators, because while Eternals does not soar like one could hope with all the talent in front of and behind the camera, it is still very well made for the most part, with few (but noticeable) missteps and a lot of things to like.
Eternals follows, well, the Eternals, nine immortal heroes sent to Earth by the bigger-than-a-planet Celestial Tiamut at the dawn of our civilization, to protect humanity from the Deviants, interstellar predators. After destroying the last Deviants on our planet some five hundred years ago, the Eternals mostly go their separate ways, integrating into human society. But when, in the present day, the Deviants suddenly return, something sinister seems afoot and the Eternals’ bonds of kinship are about to be tested.
Coming off a triple Oscar win with Nomadland (it’s great, check it out), the expectations for director (and screenwriter) Chloé Zhao’s foray into the MCU were high, possibly higher than they had any right to be. Oh, she infuses the film with her own visual and narrative style, using a lot of natural light and letting the characters breathe more than usual in these movies. Which is great, since there are a lot of characters that need at least some fleshing out, and she manages to juggle the ten or eleven new characters, at least some of whom will no doubt be returning in other MCU entries. Gemma Chan is great as Sersi, kind and thoughtful, careful and caring, she is an excellent emotional core for the story. I’m not going to go down the list to praise every actor, but even the weakest link is still good (sorry, Richard Madden, it’s in part the material you had to work with). Small shout out to Harish Patel though, who plays the valet to one of the Eternals and who brings both humor and heart to his limited role.
But the weakest part of Eternals, for me, is the story, which touches upon a great many interesting questions, but only dares or manages to answer a tiny few. While I’ll be staying out of spoiler territory here, let’s just say that there are a few things set up that have little to no payoff. A shame, yes, a bit annoying even, but not enough to really detract from the whole. What is a bigger shame is the visual translation of the Eternals from the page to the screen. I am far from an expert on the comics, but after looking at even a few pages, it is clear that the movie’s designs are all disappointingly muted and a bit boring. Their powers have cool effects and look nice, but their costumes and ship are rather drab. A pity.
Where the movie does soar is in the way it sets up its central conflict as a complex conundrum with plenty of shades of gray. I say soar, I mean ‘is a lot more interesting than the other MCU movies. The third act similarly is a more complex and intimate affair than usual. The outcome might not be a complete surprise, but it is interesting and, just as important after almost (Jesus Christ…) thirty movies: different.
A lot has been written about Marvel’s modus operandi, tempting up and coming talent with money and fame to work in their soulless factory to churn out content as if they were some kind of cultural demon corrupting creators and forcing them into the bodice of late-stage capitalism’s lowbrow, mass market content creation. But you know what? Fuck that. Sure, Eternals has issues that are the direct result of how Marvel makes its movies. But it also has a lot of great qualities because of that process. Balancing the realities of the market with the idiosyncrasies of the makers’ vision has always been the name of the game; and Marvel has no doubt complicated things with its thoroughly serialized storytelling. Still, don’t mistake mass market appeal for shallowness, let alone soullessness. Eternals is brimming with love. And it shows.
