Eternals - Movie Review

Critics Score - 5 of 10

General Audience Score - 7 of 10

The name Chloe Zhao is one that movie lovers and cinephiles all over the world started hearing over the last few years, directing a great smaller film The Rider before getting acclaim within the industry for last years’ Nomadland, which won Best Picture. Now Chloe turns her directing attention to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, doubtless for an untold large sum of money. She’s brought us Eternals, one of the more obscure groups of Marvel comic book characters, but it’s clear Zhao is just not in her element working with massive budgeted superhero films and an already patented Disney formula. Besides the tired acting from an otherwise aesthetically pleasing cast, the screenplay really lets these actors down and it’s difficult to invest anything in any of their journeys. While superhero and action movie fans will probably get their money’s worth, at an over two and a half hour runtime, the film’s title says it best, many will leave their viewing much more empathetic with our heroes, the Eternals.

SYNOPSIS - This wouldn’t be a Marvel film without an action scene straight out of the gate. We read a bit of text about some god figures creating the Eternals to fight the Deviants right before we’re taken to Mesopotamia, seven thousand years ago. The Deviants show up, some combination of reptile and bird like creatures comprised of purplish and teal tentacles, but the cro-magnon locals need fear not, the Eternals come in and save the day. Before they leave, Sersi (Gemma Chan) gives a golden dagger to a young boy while Pink Floyd’s Time cues up in back. Excellent choice, unfortunately that’s the point when most of the great directorial decisions stopped. From there we watch Ajak (Selma Hayek) and her team influence human history and technology while fighting off the remaining Deviants. But once the film gets into the character arcs, Sersi has a relationship with Ikaris (Richard Madden) and later with Dane (Kit Harington), and the dialogue and poor performances begin to wear the audience down. The redeeming character of Kingo (Kumail Nanjiani) is the bright spot of humor in a field of dry, flavorless token characters from every minority group possible.

Once the good guys beat the bad guys in all their variations, we’ve seen virtually nothing new from this latest entry in the MCU. The cinematography is quite good by comparison to other Marvel films, you can feel the direction of Chloe Zhao trying to break through, as if she was kidnapped by Disney and they performed the Get Out procedure on her body. The Marvel machine is the brain that’s been transplanted into her head, forcing her to follow the same superhero pattern of storytelling we’ve seen a hundred times. The soundtrack makes an effort to engage the audience with a couple classic rock songs but the score is very weak and uninspired. The acting is also subpar and in a few cases, pretty bad. While many of the monsters and visual effects were quite entertaining, the many scenes utilizing green screens were extremely off putting. In all, the decent dose of humor, courtesy Kumail Nanjiani, is what saves this film, although not nearly to the level of Thor Ragnarok. But the ability to chuckle and smile every so often in between watching beautiful people fight CGI monsters didn’t make for the worst movie experience of the year, but it was far from the best.

SUMMARY - While Eternals is not a bad film, this new phase of the MCU needs to start breaking out of the mold to engage audiences in a different way before they start losing them. Hiring Chloe Zhao was a good choice, forcing her to follow the same old formula, bad. Until they unleash artists, we’ll be in the same boat as the character Sprite at the end, thankful we’re not Eternals that’ll have to endure these mediocre superhero films until the end of time.