Eternals’ cosmic scale squanders director Zhao’s talents

Chloé Zhao, the indie auteur who made last year’s Oscar-winning Nomadland, is known for low-budget social-realist projects that find stark poetry in hardscrabble lives.

So what happens when her singular vision meets the massive machine of the Marvel Cinematic Universe? In Eternals, Zhao brings the prestige, but working at the cosmic scale the MCU increasingly favours, with characters moving across galaxies and through thousands of years, she loses the intimacy and immediacy that made her interesting in the first place. Zhao and the MCU feel like a mismatch.

Co-scripting with Patrick Burleigh, Ryan Firpo and Kaz Firpo, Zhao does manage to knock the Marvel formula out of its familiar tracks. She pulls off some fine individual scenes, raises a few intriguing ideas, but never finds a compelling vibe of her own. This overlong faux-epic is action-filled without being exciting and dense without being profound.

The movie opens with the phrase, “In the beginning,” which sounds a tad biblical. A celestial entity named Arishem — very big and very red — sends the Eternals to Earth in 5,000 BCE, just as the Sumerians are forming towns. Immortal beings with a range of powers, the Eternals are there to protect humans from intergalactic predators called Deviants, singularly uninteresting baddies brought to the screen through mediocre CGI.

The strong international cast does its best to power through material that is often stiff and sometimes preposterous. Ajak (Salma Hayek) is the leader. Her lieutenants, Sersi (Gemma Chan) and Ikaris (Richard Madden), have a convincing grownup relationship and — unusual for a Marvel movie — an actual sex scene. We also have the warrior Thena (Angelina Jolie being aloof), the jokester Kingo (Kumail Nanjiani being comical) and the super-strong Gilgamesh (Ma Dong-seok, billed here as Don Lee). Phastos (Brian Tyree Henry) is an engineer, Makkari (Lauren Ridloff) is a speedster, and Druig (Barry Keoghan) specializes in mind control. The odd-girl-out is Sprite (Lia McHugh), who may be millennia old but presents as a child and has romantic feelings for an adult man, a subplot that feels icky and off.

Thinking of themselves as “Earth’s original superheroes,” the Eternals have been living among humans for 7,000 years, helping us develop art and lit, the plough and the steam engine. As we see, they have nudged along the founding of Babylon, the Gupta empire and the Aztec civilization. On the other hand, they’re not allowed to interfere with human conflicts, allowing all kinds of suffering and destruction to take place on their watch, which seems like an odd, unsatisfactory mission.

At about the 90-minute mark, this apparent contradiction gets explained (sort of) in an awkward, momentum-stopping exposition dump, but the film’s mythology continues to feel arbitrary and unconvincing. Eventually the Eternals are torn between their celestial marching orders and their earthly loyalties.

The film’s tone splits along similar lines. At times, the Eternals seem omniscient and omnipotent, serenely semi-divine. At other times, they gossip about the Avengers, gripe about cellphone service and engage in family feuds. Nanjiani is funny, but his funniness mostly shows up the leaden solemnity of everyone else.

As a Chinese-born filmmaker, Zhao is able to convey a global history that feels truly global, not just American. She also helps to advance Marvel’s recent attempts at fuller representation. There are changes in gender and race from the original comics, with inclusion brought out in a low-key, matter-of-fact way. Makkari is a Deaf character played by a Deaf performer, for example, and Phastos is a gay man who gets a tender family storyline.

There’s another crucial aspect of Zhao’s indie approach that makes it into Eternals. Zhao specializes in showing figures in wide open landscapes — the Dakotas, the American southwest — especially at that golden hour when the sun is just setting. Her feeling for the natural world extends to Eternals. Except for an opening sequence set in London, Zhao eschews the usual MCU city-wrecking sky battles, with key events taking place in the Amazon rainforest, the Australian outback and America’s Great Plains, often to breathtaking effect.

Zhao works beautifully at that scale. Bring in the portentous overreach of the Eternals’ cosmos-shaking storyline, though, and her talent is diminished. For Zhao, bigger is not better.

alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca

Alison Gillmor
Writer

Studying at the University of Winnipeg and later Toronto’s York University, Alison Gillmor planned to become an art historian. She ended up catching the journalism bug when she started as visual arts reviewer at the Winnipeg Free Press in 1992.

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