Review: ‘Eternals,’ A Disaster of Cosmic Proportions
“If this is what the end of the world looks like, at least we'll have front-row seats...”
After finding success with her last two films, Chloé Zhao was on the fast track to becoming one of the best up-and-coming directors working today. In 2018, she made The Rider: a critical darling that provided a “somber look at passion and purpose in the lives of young South Dakota bull riders.” In 2020, Nomadland, an awards juggernaut capable of evoking “a sentimental response towards one individual’s search for belonging within the decaying foundation of America.” Both films were richly detailed and held promise for what Zhao’s could do in the years ahead of her. However, when news broke that she would be directing Marvel’s Eternals, there was considerable concern that she would fall victim to Marvel’s long track record of scooping up relatively unknown indie directors and thrusting them into a multimillion dollar production with the intent of, despite what interviews may suggest, exerting a degree of control over the final product.
While MCU movies largely follow a rinse and repeat formula that cultivates stale products, there was some hope that the winner of last year’s best director and best picture could make a franchise film as interesting as her previous films, or at least some fraction of. Which is why it saddens me to say that Chloé Zhao’s Eternals is quite bad.
The film certainly has lofty ambitions. It’s set around a team of ten ‘Eternals,’ cosmic beings who are sent from planet to planet to protect the inhabiting life from ‘Deviants,’ animal-like aliens that are hostile to other organisms. Both the Eternals and Deviants were created by Celestials, the presumed Genesis gods of the MCU who are thousands of miles tall and forge all matter in the universe via ‘emergence events.’ These emergence events destroy entire planets, but give rise to new life in different galaxies, making birth and rebirth the ultimate goal for Celestials. Coincidentally, an emergence is about to take place on Earth, and the Eternals need to contemplate whether they save the planet they have come to know and love or align with the directive given to them by their Celestial creators.
All that narrative technobabble really doesn’t matter, because the film is irredeemably fractured. The film modulates back and forth in time, jumping from one exotic location to the next, stitching together something that resembles a sweeping epic in the loosest sense. In the present timeline, the Eternals assemble a team of disparate members who have gone their separate ways over the centuries. In the past timeline, the film depicts the Eternals at the crossroads of seminal historical events that changed the trajectory of human history. With the mandated world saving, emergence of intergalactic gods, and requisite franchise building all mixed in, it’s an information overload. There’s simply too much going on, and yet, even with two hours and thirty-seven minutes of runtime, the majority of scenes only last between forty-five seconds and two minutes, leaving each moment fleeting in the need to cover the next character or story beat. The film desperately needs to be pared down to save face, but the scope of the narrative prohibits it.
Within that lengthy runtime, there are hopes to commentate on human origins and where our place in history is, but such grand themes fall on deaf ears. Not only are these ideas conveyed haphazardly, splintered across ten protagonists in the aforementioned confusion that is this narrative, but nothing finite ever really materializes. It’s all just vague gestures at the idea without thorough engagement. One such instance is the film’s comic book revisionism of the bombing of Hiroshima in which an Eternal blames himself for not stopping humanity before they could commit the atrocity; the scene is maybe forty seconds long and it's designed to be a quick throw away for one character, but it fully encapsulates just how abrupt and ill-equipped the film can feel when it comes to constructing a scene with an astute point about relevant anthropological matters.
Perhaps the most garish component of the film is its blend of natural visuals with CGI. From the first trailers, there was fervent debate over how bland the film would ultimately look, and while Zhao’s previous films utilized a similar look that emphasized an inherent naturalism and beauty found in their locations, they were never smeared with this much CGI. It’s not that Eternals looks bad because of its color palette, it’s that the naturalism presented in the film is undermined by all the CGI goop that woefully distorts any sense of realism cultivated by its cinematography. Landscapes are empty and devoid of life, giving the impression that the sparse vistas were a creative choice to get clean VFX slates for post-production rather than actually wanting to engage with the environment. Eternals and Deviants fly around empty fields or cold shorelines with nothing but the augmentation of Industrial Light and Magic to liven up the frame. Both the CGI and the desire to shoot with a sense of realism come in disastrous odds of one another that ultimately creates a film that looks, frankly, very ugly.
Two years ago during a Hollywood Reporter round table, Lulu Wang was asked, in the wake of the success of her debut feature The Farewell, if she was approached by a studio to direct a super hero film. While she did not disclose which film the proposal was for, her affirmative response to the question along with her reason for turning it down came with a poignant statement about artistic integrity: “[It’s] really made by committee. And that’s one of the reasons I don’t want to do it right now because I haven’t figured out my voice as a filmmaker.” The response was not only an omission of a private studio meeting that rarely goes public, but it was also an example of someone early in their career choosing artistic individuality over the glitz and glam of a Hollywood blockbuster franchise.
Maybe some directors want that. They grind for years to make it big, and perhaps when given the opportunity, they’ll jump at it instead of struggling with small independent films for the rest of their careers. But I fear that Eternals has done to Zhao what Wang worried would happen to her: Zhao lost her voice in this cosmic disaster.
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