Envy lies at the core in the long, ongoing war between Marvel and The Distinguished Competition: Each wants what the other has. In the modern era, this conflict is displayed in the cinematic sphere, a public arena in which post-Disney acquisition Marvel handily won, at least at the box office and in the popular consciousness. Their films are legitimate cultural events, well-reviewed and gossiped about, and entire lamprey-like industries of bottom feeders have symbiotically leeched on to their underbellies, sucking bits and pieces of rumor and information from fleeting bites beneath the monster’s armored skin. What, possibly, could Marvel want from their lesser, having had it all? Well, respect. One only needs to look at the reception Zack Snyder got from the film/nerd community and the public at large once a greater consciousness emerged about his mistreatment at the hands of Warners and DC brass and resulted in the creation — and good reception– of Zack Snyder’s Justice League. Like his films or not, there is no way one can separate his name from the films that he makes (proof that the “visionary director” branding has some manner of effect), which is a feat that Marvel has only managed to equal once or twice: Perhaps Taika Waititi or Ryan Coogler was as well known as the properties that they were adapting. They wanted all of the trappings of auteurism for a project like Eternals, and hired an indie darling in the form of Chloe Zhao, winner of last year’s Best Picture Oscar for Nomadland, to shepherd a consciousness-altering film that would “hit different” into the eyes of grateful audiences around the world.
It’s genuinely frustrating to say this — and not out of any manner of pride or fanboy defensiveness or anything other than sheer crushing disappointment — but Eternals is the kind of soulless and vacant product that so many Marvel haters have often accused the MCU of being in years past. It abandons every single thing that made the massive franchise run under the hood while doubling down on the worst aspects of this corner of the superhero genre’s style. It’s ugly, charisma-free, dour, overlong, exposition-heavy, patronizing, and, worst of all, it has none of the heart even feinted at by the least successful films within the MCU canon. It is a dispiriting experience, one that makes the viewer dread the idea of ever seeing any of these characters again, and is perhaps what comic book fans assumed would happen with the first Guardians of the Galaxy film back when it was announced: a terrible merger of filmmaker and form and an oft-miscast ensemble that would turn off normies and quickly be shunted into whatever cornfield that Terence Howard disappeared to after the first Iron Man. At the ridiculous 150-minute runtime that the film sits at, I can’t even guess how many folks will either walk out of the theater they’re in midway through or, if they’re streaming, will eventually give up and go back to watch Ant-Man or something again after clicking on it when it arrives on Disney+. You know, one of the fun ones. Or, hell, maybe they’ll just go watch the new cut of Justice League.
You see, Snyder and Zhao are concerned with similar things: They want to illustrate the issues of being a super-powered individual in a world that they’ve grown with, as they’re forced to endure the possible obliteration of a place they’ve come to love, thanks to their obligations to a mysterious “other,” and there’s a heavy emphasis on these characters being like “gods,” at a remove from humanity even as they try to participate in it. But where Snyder emphasizes both grit and Wagnerian theatrics as he fully dedicates every ounce of his energy to crafting eye-popping images even if it’s at the expense of the things comic fans lust over, and as he attempts to imagine an interesting answer to the question of “What if God was one of us?,” Zhao literalizes it. Enter the Eternals, a race of super-powered alien beings from a galaxy, far, far away, who have been sent by the Celestial master to watch over the people of Earth during the planet’s infancy. Their mission: protect nascent human civilization from the Deviants (CGI, occasionally Bill Skarsgard in a mo-cap suit), who are sort of alien “apex predators” (as the film handily informs us). They’re forbidden from intervening in human conflict, but their celestial god-emperor is a little laxer with the rules than, say, the Prime Directive is in Star Trek. As such, the Eternals shape human civilization, guiding the evolution of humanity over the ages, kicking off periods of technological advancement as well as inventing stories of themselves as gods to be filtered down through the ages. A schism occurs in the group in 1521, during the Conquistador pillage of a South American village (outside of two recurring characters, humans are rarely glimpsed here, and when they are seen, they’re usually genociding one another), which causes them to split up.
Cut to 500 years later: Sersei (Gemma Chan), the group’s resident manipulator of matter (She can change rocks into water! She can change trees into water!), is living a peaceful life incognito in London, where she works at a museum as a teacher. Her boyfriend (Kit Harrington, one of two humans in the cast) wants her to move in with him, but she’s hesitant to commit, given that she’s an immortal superhuman who will undoubtedly outlive him. She’s in London with the illusion-master Sprite (Lia McHugh), who, like Kirsten Dunst in Interview With the Vampire, is an immortal being in what’s basically a child’s body: we see her crafting an illusion of an older woman in order to flirt with a dickhead at the bar, which is… discomforting, to say the least. On the way home from the pub, they’re attacked by a self-healing Deviant, which is surprising for two reasons: they thought they killed all of them centuries ago, and healing is about a power which they weren’t expecting it to have. The day is saved by Ikaris (Richard Madden), who arrives at the last moment to rescue the threesome, and it’s decided that they need to get the band back together. I’m gonna list them all here in rapid-fire fashion because I’m already getting tired thinking about it: There’s Druig (Barry Keoghan), who can control minds and fucked off into the jungles of South America to raise his own mind-control slave tribe of pacifists; Thena (Angelina Jolie), who is the goddess Athena but has weird superhero dementia, who is watched over by the Tank of the group, Gilgamesh (Don Lee); there’s Makkari (Lauren Ridloff), a deaf speedster who apparently invented sign language; there’s laser-gun fingered Kingo (Kumail Nanjiani), a Bollywood actor and vainglorious asshole, complete with a manservant; Phaistos (Bryan Tyree Henry), the super-inventor, who has a bad habit of making things at the exact wrong time for humanity (in which Marvel surpasses their glib referencing of human trafficking in the most hilarious possible fashion) and who has since retired to live with his husband and kid in the suburbs; and, finally, Ajax (Salma Hayek), the group’s leader, who knows about their master’s secret designs for the planet and their real purpose there.
Before we get into the real meat of why I disliked this film so much, let’s touch on the film’s unremarkable look, which is as if an Instagram filter had been applied to a CW superhero show. Zhao’s filmmaking flourishes as we’ve known them — a Malickian naturalism, usually photographed in a sense-stimulating way, coupled with semi-honest performances — aren’t really present for much of the film, with most of Eternals‘ style being the same old Marvel-core imagery. There are, of course, grey battle sequences loaded with CGI (that only gets more noticeable the more one digs into the fights themselves, which can most likely be better experienced — and interacted with — in any of the modern Final Fantasy games), an ugly muddy color-grading that perhaps best serves the digital artists working on detail-lacking renders, and, of course, a semi-colorful acknowledgment of the cosmic weirdness that only a person like Jack Kirby could have invented. If the argument is that a consistent style between films is worthwhile, given the shared universe concept, one can only imagine how much grander it might have looked had filmmakers been let off the leash to follow their heart’s odd desires. If, instead, we’re trying to say this is a work of unbridled auteurism, free of studio influence and interference, well, it suggests that her specific cinematic imagination isn’t well-suited to this kind of epic storytelling. Regardless, the meager amount of golden/magic hour-shot cinematography that Feige and the PR corps have pointed to and will continue to gesture at in public comments is not the kind of bread that one can live on, to say absolutely nothing of the other absent nutrients needed for any kind of storytelling to provide some measure of sustenance or enrichment. It’s embarrassing that this is going to push Dune off of IMAX screens in a little over a week because that’s a film that deserves the presentation. You could watch this on TV, if you wanted to. The experience won’t be changed.
But all of that is small potatoes — and endemic to Marvel movies — compared to what lies at the rotten heart of this movie. For years, the studio has had a stable formula, and it’s been one that’s worked well for them: introduce your characters, give viewers something interesting to latch on to — a new setting, or, ideally, fun and compelling personalities to watch banter and grow — and fully form them before introducing them into new settings with other characters, especially if they’re unknown to the public. You can skip that last step if you’re dealing with a figure as well known as Spider-Man, as they did in Captain America: Civil War, because every single person can most likely describe exactly what his deal is, but you can’t do that with a list of esoteric C-listers like the Eternals, especially if your point is how inaccessible and estranged these characters are from everyday life. Few of the characters have any warmth to them and, even if they fuck on screen, it’s not a substitute for some measure of character evolution: there is no arc here that is resonant or unique for the film, with Feige and Zhao having abandoned the sole aspect of the Neil Gaiman take on the characters that made them narratively compelling: There, the characters had forgotten their memories of their massive adventures and assumed they were human, but here, they remember everything (perhaps Captain Marvel made the twist feel redundant, especially with their releases so close together). Again, their non-intervention policy makes no sense, especially when one character aids in one of the 20th century’s most explosive events, seen weeping in the fallout, and their in-universe explanation for not helping the world against Thanos… also doesn’t hold water. I’m not going to spoil much if anything, but there’s also an unsatisfactory revelation about why these characters are so garbage that attempts to provide a reason why, but it makes total sense, and also suggests that, in other hands, these characters would have been villains, especially stripped of their Kirby-ian insanity.
Again, the aspect of the MCU that separated it from all prior comic book cinema was its warmth: it, at its core, was a celebration of the humanity within these mega-powered men and women, with the slight psychological complexity of the Mighty Marvel Way straight from the comic books sprinkled atop it like sugar to help the fable go down. Every character both fulfills a viewer’s fantasy through their power yet is tempered by a downside — not a tangible weakness like kryptonite, but an aspect of their character that must be overcome for them to be wise and just. These are compelling takes on a Hero’s Journey-style tale, and they were embodied well by the name actors who were smartly cast in the right roles. But Eternals doesn’t have a replacement for those well-loved characters lined-up, nor does it take a particularly bright view of humanity. One remembers the scene in the first Avengers where Loki goes off about how people need to be controlled, that they should want to kneel before the powers before them, and it’s as if Zhao and Feige watched that scene and said to themselves “You know, maybe he was right.” The Eternals are cultural Imperialists, robbing humanity of the beauty of its achievements (our fables, our religions, our ceremonies) and likewise stealing from us the uniqueness of our evils and failures (the recipe for gunpowder and other things having been shared with them), and one has to wonder: if they’re speaking in accented English, did they plant those cultural seeds too? Are we descended from them, like a portion of the population is from Genghis Khan? But I’d doubt they’d want to mix genes with us as the film’s perspective is that, without the guiding hand of a well-muscled super-race, humanity would have fallen into darkness and despair centuries before it ever had a chance to thrive. This, again, is at odds with everything Marvel has given us to date, except for the Avengers’ attempts to circumvent international law, given that they know what’s better for us than us, like inventing a super-A.I. to watch over the world.
The more I think about it, the more respect I have for Snyder for just being willing to make nakedly fascist art, echoing the Wagner featured on his soundtracks and the Nietzchian ethos at the heart of the name “Superman.” But he also prominently features human characters, who offer a necessary counterweight to the talk of Gods and Monsters, and even has one — though his power may be his wealth — that co-leads his big team. But this is also what makes the allusions to DC characters scattered all throughout Eternals so strange: the film seems to want you to draw a link between these two forms, for you to compare and contrast the characters and cheer when you see what little subversion it’s doing, but it ultimately suggests the lack. Marvel never even had to acknowledge the existence of other worlds beyond their own (or, well, within the stable of IP that Disney owns), but here, they attempt to stoke fires in the mind, perhaps to take a victory trot after sinking the winning three in the championship-deciding ball game, having left their small-market team to play with the big boys in the big city on some super team. Hell, they’ve already probably got their backs turned. But this shot rims out, and I’m thinking that Feige and the Mighty Marvel Machine won’t know the damage they’ve done to the soul of their brand of storytelling until they begin to hear the laughs and jeers of the crowd. It will sound unfamiliar to them, but perhaps they need to hear it.