direcred by Chloe Zhao
written by Ryan Firpo, Kaz Firpo, Patrick Burleigh, Zhao
As I write this, Marvel's November 2021 release Eternals has just made its debut on Disney+ after a two-month theatrical run that has seen it earn around USD 401 million at the global box-office and garner a franchise-low 47% "rotten" rating, according to review aggregator rottentomatoes.com.
A lot has been said about this movie during its theatrical run, a lot of it bad, and one common criticism of the film is that the film has too many characters to juggle, which prevents the audience from making a meaningful connection with any one of them. I don't entirely agree with this; personally I think it still could have worked had the filmmakers effectively focused on the conflict between duty and conscience, which could have played out much more strongly had it been more properly developed. Having ten characters wasn't necessarily an obstacle to this; better writers, like Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame scribes Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely could have pulled it off in my opinion.
One oft-repeated hot take is that Eternals should have been a six-episode Disney+ series instead of a two-and-a-half hour movie, which is something with which I must respectfully but strongly disagree.
Eternals is basically the story of ten otherworldly beings of extraordinary power, headed by Ajak (Salma Hayek) and her right-hand man Ikaris (Richard Madden) sent to Earth thousands of years ago to protect humanity from monsters known as the Deviants. They have been instructed by their principal, Arishem the Celestial, not to interfere in human affairs unless Deviants are involved, though they are allowed, in a fashion, to help guide humankind along in the realization of its potential. When the Eternals defeat the last deviant in the 1500s, they also find themselves shocked by the atrocities of the conquistadores. Druig (Barry Keoghan) whose power is mind-control, breaks the rules and intervenes, and thereafter the group essentially disbands and each of them go their separate ways.
Centuries later, and in the wake of the events of the war with Thanos, a new threat emerges, one strong enough to kill one of the Eternals, that has the group getting back together again.
Eternals is a movie that, for all its flaws, deserved to be seen on the big screen because it has a distinct visual identity that couldn't really have been captured on the small screen. While director Chloe Zhao inevitably shot much of the film on Pinewood Studios' sound stages, undoubtedly for the more fantastical elements of the movie, she also shot a significant portion of it on location in the Canary Islands, giving the film a nice, lived-in, earthy feel, which were a nice point of contrast against the ethereal, otherworldly aesthetic that Zhao used to manifest the Eternals' powers. It had a visual sense of scope that just couldn't be captured on television, and yes, I have seen the Loki series.
Zhao's eye for stunning beauty is clearest in the scenes in set among ancient civilizations, and later, in scenes in which the characters commune in the desert. The scene in which the characters dine together is something I particularly liked; with very few exceptions you rarely see these larger-than-life characters do something as mundane as eat, and it was not only refreshing to see but enjoyable to see the food rendered onscreen with such visual flourish. It's nice to know that it isn't just food commercials that can depict appetizing food. Zhao even managed to put her personal stamp on the obligatory action sequences. While unfortunately, she couldn't prevent Richard Madden's Ikaris from looking like a poor man's Superman, I quite liked how she envisioned, among others, the balletic fighting style of Angelina Jolie's Thena, complete with her ability to manifest her golden weapons, sort of like an angelic version of Thor: Ragnarok's Hela. I even liked the look of the Deviants.
SPOILER ALERT: From this point onwards I will discuss plot-related spoilers. If you still want to go into this movie unspoiled you may end the review here.
6.5/10
Another aspect of the film that really warranted a big-screen presentation was the literal size of the antagonist, i.e. Arishem the Celestial, a mile-high giant that can basically destroy the world, as well as Tiamut, a nascent Celestial buried in the Earth thousands of years ago, who nearly does just that at the climax of the film. Literal titans like this need to be seen on the big screen.
Also, unlike with so many other Marvel films, at the very outset it's made clear that not every character will make it to the end credits, something we don't always get in a franchise's launching movie.
Visually, the film more than justified its presence on the big screen, but its muddled script and some rather uninspired performances ultimately let it down. Salma Hayek's Ajak deserved much more screen time than she got, especially considering that she was one of the focal points of the film's conflict of conscience. Her story deserved more than being the object of the cheap "Marvel twist" that it got when it was revealed that Ikaris betrayed her.
Speaking of Ikaris, it is never established, up until the point of his betrayal, why he believes as deeply as he does in his mission, to the point that he is willing to betray and murder his fellow Eternal, and this is one of the film's major failings, just as the film also fails to establish why the heroic Sersi (Gemma Chan) loves humans so much that she is willing to spare them. At least Ajak's motivations were clear.
Clearly all of the Eternals have different reactions to living among humans for thousands of years. Phastos (Bryan Tyree Henry) finds love, Makkari (Lauren Ridloff) finds boredom, and literally lives on their mothership with all of her accumulated junk from Earth, waiting to go home, Druig finds peace with his mind-controlled enclave of humans deep in the jungle, Kingo (Kumail Nanjiani) finds fame and fortune, Sprite (Lia McHugh) find frustration at spending thousands of years in the body of a child, while Thena (Angelina Jolie) accompanied by Gilgamesh (Don Lee) finds an uneasy rest from her Mahd W'yry, which is basically a condition that befalls some Eternals as a direct result of living for thousands of years. All of these characters with their individual reactions to these events could have been a storytelling goldmine and could have easily lived up to the "diversity" banner often used to market this film, but instead the filmmakers wasted time on Sersi and Ikaris' love story. The so-called "diverse" cast of characters feels like little more than decorations.
I found it frustrating that the film couldn't be bothered to elaborate on why its main antagonist or its main protagonist think the way they do. There could have been adequate build-up leading up to the twist that Ikaris had murdered Ajak, some dialogue discussing his devotion to the Eternals' mission. The filmmakers also passed up the chance to pose a real moral quandary given the established fact in the narrative that the Celestials actually create life, which meant that killing one would actually prevent this from happening, and which could have helped deepen the conflict between the two factions.
So yes, I did have my issues with Eternals, but I still think it deserved its big-screen treatment.
6.5/10
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