MOVIE:
Eternals
WHERE TO WATCH:
Now showing in cinemas
OUR RATING:
3/5 Stars
WHAT IT'S ABOUT:
The Eternals are a race of immortals created by the godlike Celestials to protect life on Earth from the destructive force of the Deviants. Thousands of years ago, the Eternals believed that they had rid the planet of all deviants and decided to go their separate ways, interfering in human affairs only occasionally. Now, months after the defeat of Thanos by the Avengers, one of the Eternals, Sersi (Gemma Chan), suddenly finds herself face to face with new and deadlier Deviants and what begins as a mission to gather the scattered immortals together to face the new threat soon reveals a far greater conspiracy and shocking revelations about who the Eternals are and what their mission on Earth truly is.
WHAT WE THOUGHT:
As the first Marvel Studios movie to receive a "rotten" rating on review aggregate site, Rotten Tomatoes, there's a lot to unpack with Eternals.
But first, a quick bit of comic book history.
A mainstay of the industry since the inception of the American superhero comic book, Jack Kirby well and truly earned his nickname 'The King of Comics' in the 1960s when, along with Stan Lee, he would go on to create what we now know as the Marvel Universe, even as his "blocky" but highly expressive, explosive artwork redefined the visual language of comics forever. He may not have personally created every single Marvel character that has populated the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but it's not even the slightest exaggeration to say that none of it would have existed without Jack Kirby.
Fed up with Stan Lee claiming the lion's share of credit for his work, Kirby left the company he helped build but continued to be mistreated and at the end of the '60s headed over to the "Distinguished Competition" and, given free rein at DC, he went on to create what he saw as his masterpiece, the New Gods. Though characters like Mister Miracle and Darkseid would become DC mainstays in the years ahead, Kirby's New Gods titles were cancelled before he had the chance to finish what he intended to be a limited story with a beginning, middle and end.
Created by Kirby to be a fully fleshed out mythology informed by his renewed interest in religion - not least his own Judaism – the series proved to be too dense for general audiences and, lacking the much more accessible scripting ability of his former partner, pretty alienating too. Indeed, though it's a tremendous piece of visual storytelling overflowing with incredible ideas and gorgeous art, it's a very, very clunky read.
Dispirited, Kirby headed back to Marvel, where he was given the chance to explore similar themes with Marvel's own New Gods. The Eternals and their surrounding mythology was the result, but, perhaps unsurprisingly, it suffered a fate much worse than his DC work: it was cancelled early while never having the staying power that the New Gods have enjoyed over the years.
I mention all this not just because of my endless fascination with the history of the American comic book industry, but because much of what works and what doesn't work about the film can be traced back to that very history.
Eternals is a film that is high on big ideas and has an epic sweep almost unmatched in the Marvel Cinematic Universe so far, but those big ideas are sometimes muddled and require plenty of exposition that constantly slows down the otherwise fairly basic plot. The film also changes an awful lot from the comics - and usually for the worse – but rather than streamlining the Eternals mythology, it just creates another, less compelling and much more nonsensical mythology of its own that really crumbles in the final act when our heroes are faced with a moral dilemma that doesn't make a lick of sense.
As for the characters, there are some nice performances here, and a few of the characters are genuinely interesting, but if the Eternals as a concept was second-rate New Gods, the Eternals themselves are second-rate copies of other superheroes. Let's just say that it's not for nothing that this is the first Marvel film to reference, by name, DC's Superman and Batman & Robin. Not that these are the first lesser-known superheroes to be modelled on the templates of the likes of Superman, Wonder-Woman and The Flash, but not enough is done with the characters themselves to make them stand out.
Sure, they're the most racially diverse roster of superheroes ever (there's a fair amount of gender flipping and some race swapping from the comics), but the overriding theme of their being a family never quite congeals. Certainly, for all its flaws, Black Widow handles the same found-family dynamic with significantly more success. As, in fact, does the much more memorable Guardians of the Galaxy.
And don't even get me started on the surprisingly lame take on the Deviants here that replaces a wide assortment of colourful monsters that come straight out of Marvel's earlier monster story days with some relatively nondescript and uniform designs. Even the CGI is pretty shoddy at times.
For all of this, though, there is certainly plenty to like here. First, there are some stand out characters and performances. While Gemma Chan does a fine job as the straight man of the group and the film's main character (yes, for those counting, that's two Marvel films in a row with an Asian lead) and Angelina Jolie and Salma Hayek prove that women over fifty can do this sort of thing too (though their characters are fairly meh), the standouts are clearly Kumail Nanjiani as Kingo, who turned his powers and immortality into a legendary "family legacy" of Bollywood superstars, and Brian Tyree Henry as Phastos, the Eternal most wary of humanity who happens to be living the most human life of them all (he also happens to be the MCU's first gay superhero, a fact that is handled very matter of factly).
Nanjiani is responsible for most of the film's humour, unsurprisingly, but his character is also deeper and in many ways sadder than his fellow Eternals. Henry, meanwhile, has a smaller part than most, but he makes the most of it, bringing plenty of humanity and much needed grounded humanity to the mix.
The real reason to see Eternals, though, isn't the actors (not even for the on-screen reunion of Richard Madden and Kit Harrington as the latter is under-used and the former is bland but redacted for spoilers and the two share almost no screen time anyway) and it certainly isn't the script by Chloe Zhao, Patrick Burleigh and Ryan Firpo, which is not among the MCU's best, to say the least. It isn't even that this is the first MCU film to actually contain an honest-to-goodness (if very PG) sex scene.
Nope, it's that for all the talk of Marvel Studios churning out faceless products, they have in recent years gotten very good at allowing some of their more idiosyncratic directors to make their films their own, and they have very much done it here with Chloe Zhao, the Oscar-winning writer/ director of Nomadland. Not that Nomadland (or, presumably, her earlier films that haven't seen wide release in this country) have much in common with Eternals, but it had a real visual sweep to it that is on full display here.
Teaming up with accomplished cinematographer Ben Davis and top composer, Ramin Djawadi, Zhao has created a feast for the senses that demands to be seen (and heard) on the biggest screen possible. Most impressively, she beautifully captures some of that Kirby magic by directly referencing some of his singular designs and capturing the sense of scale, scope, and pure, boundless imagination of an artist who could make a humble comic book page look hundreds of miles wide and more three-dimensional than all the 3D glasses in the world put together.
There's tons wrong with Eternals, but this alone makes it well worth a watch, preferably in a proper cinema, especially after Zack Snyder so thoroughly butchered the look and feel of Kirby's New Gods in his Justice League movie.
Now, if only Ava Duvernay's New Gods was actually happening...
WATCH THE TRAILER HERE: