Eternals (2021)

Film: Eternals (2021)

Stars: Gemma Chan, Richard Madden, Kumail Nanjiani, Lia McHugh, Brian Tyree Henry, Lauren Ridloff, Barry Keoghan, Don Lee, Harish Patel, Kit Harington, Salma Hayek, Angelina Jolie

Director: Chloe Zhao

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

We are now 26 films into the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and, well, we all kind of know the formula at this point, right?  After we spent 22 films leading up to the ultimate Avengers showcase in Avengers: Endgame (remember Thanos & his glowing hand), the story has continued and been a bit sprawling, if we can be honest.  Spider-Man: Far From Home was a disappointment (for yours truly), unable to get me all that interested in a world beyond Thanos, and Black Widow was an origin story that would've been more interesting five years ago.  Shang-Chi had me intrigued, as we had a film that, again, did the origin story thing but was so well-cast (particularly Awkafina & Tony Leung) that it felt elevated and like Marvel knew how to do a twist on a story that had become familiar.  And like every sentient being, I'll be seeing Spider-Man as soon as I can because you an only shove so much speculation into one movie without stoking my curiosity (I am confident this will become the first film to make $1 billion post the pandemic).  But I don't know that there's been a Marvel movie in a long time that had me genuinely as curious as Eternals did.  From the mind of Chloe Zhao, fresh off of her well-deserved Oscar for Nomadland, it'd been a longtime since we'd had a creative mind like this behind a Marvel film-would Zhao be able to put her distinctive, introspective spin on a movie so integral to the Disney machine's brand?  I was intrigued, and the divisive reviews had me even more curious.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie takes place over literal centuries, as we learn about a group of protectors to the planet called the Eternals.  They are led by Ajak (Hayek), who gets her orders from a Celestial named Arishem.  They are asked to simply battle an invasive species known as Deviants, but not to stop or interfere with any other violence or war (i.e. this is why they didn't help in the battle for Thanos, a question that has been levied at this group since it was decided to introduce it into the Marvel Universe).  When the Deviants are defeated (or so they assume) in 1521, the group breaks up but they remain on the planet for centuries, never aging & taking their lives/powers in different directions.  When a Deviant shows up in modern day around Sersi (Chan) and Sprite (McHugh), it sets in course a chain-of-events that reunites all of the Eternals, who learn complicated truths about their existence and what their true role has been for thousands of years across the universe.

That's about all of the plot I'm going to get into, both because this article isn't a Wikipedia article (if you want to know more, go see the movie), and because it's hard to summarize Eternals, which plays well (like several films we've reviewed this week, length is never an obstacle in what we're sitting through), almost like a miniseries.  It is very, very hard to write a film like this where you have to introduce a dozen or so characters and not give some of their stories short shift, but Zhao pulls it off-the characters in this film feel distinctive, realized, & well-cast.  It's hard to pinpoint an exact person I liked the best (Richard Madden & Barry Koeghan probably rise to the top if I had to pick), but the actors feel exactly true to their star personas, and it never feels like we're lingering too long on one hero or staying away too far from another.

The film's best moments, though, are the way that Zhao introduces risk & consequence into a Marvel Cinematic Universe where increasingly that doesn't exist.  Eternals is not faultless (it relies too heavily on exposition, particularly in picking up some of the looser ends of the plot toward the back-half of the film), but it has genuine stakes.  Some of these characters will die, some of them big names that might have made sense for a future film.  It's messy-there are tangents that don't quite work-but it's also creative & fascinating.  It looks beautiful, it uses a terrific score from Ramin Djawadi (random aside, but having Djawadi score a film where Jon Snow & Robb Stark fight over a woman named Cersei...at what point did Marvel realize exactly what they were doing here for the Game of Thrones fanboys?), and its effects are glorious.  I loved the way that the costumes become their own special effect, and the golden fighting effects are elegant & distinct.  I genuinely liked it, not because it's a truly great film (Marvel has technically done better), but it's the most creative I've seen the MCU be in at least a decade.  Here's to hoping that MCU sees the benefits of having stories like this in the future.