{"id":722209,"date":"2021-10-24T14:00:00","date_gmt":"2021-10-24T18:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.denofgeek.com\/?p=722209"},"modified":"2023-10-10T06:08:20","modified_gmt":"2023-10-10T10:08:20","slug":"eternals-review-chloe-zhao-marvel-movie","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.denofgeek.com\/movies\/eternals-review-chloe-zhao-marvel-movie\/","title":{"rendered":"Eternals Review: Chlo\u00e9 Zhao Makes a Marvel Movie Like No Other"},"content":{"rendered":"

For considerable swaths of its hefty running time, Marvel Studios’ Eternals<\/a><\/em><\/strong> doesn’t feel much like the “typical” Marvel movie, whatever that may be. At its best, Eternals<\/em><\/strong> attempts to push the Marvel Cinematic Universe forward in new directions, much like Thor<\/em><\/strong>, the two Captain America<\/em><\/strong> sequels, Avengers: Infinity War<\/a><\/em><\/strong> and Black Panther<\/em><\/strong> did. While it may not ultimately be as successful as most of those films were at doing so, Eternals<\/em><\/strong> takes more than a few risks—almost payoff enough after 25 previously more traditional MCU outings.<\/p>

The Eternals themselves are probably among the most esoteric and obscure<\/a> of Marvel’s thousands of characters, largely being visible to only the most diehard readers. Created by Jack Kirby and unveiled in 1976 via a 12-issue series written and drawn by the master, the Eternals were posited as a race of superbeings who watch over Earth at the behest of their creators, the gigantic cosmic beings known as the Celestials, and protect it from the Deviants, a monstrous race also accidentally created by the Celestials.<\/p>

The Eternals’ comic book mythos<\/a> is long and complicated—even if they’ve appeared in print relatively rarely compared to other Marvel heroes—and it weaves together dozens of characters and storylines. Even Thanos himself is an Eternal<\/a>, according to the comics. Marvel Studios has streamlined and altered the Eternals’ backstory for the screen, but it’s still unwieldy enough that the script by director Chloé Zhao<\/a>, (Nomadland<\/a><\/em><\/strong>) and three other writers, has to work its way through a number of flashbacks and exposition dumps.<\/p>

Those prove to be among the sequences that make this 156-minute origin story feel slow and even inert at times, but they’re balanced out by (ironically enough) the humanity and intimacy that Zhao and her excellent cast bring to this millennia-spanning epic.<\/p>

The main narrative is kicked off in the present with the reappearance of Deviants—conceived here as the same kind of pouncing, overgrown CG monsters we’ve seen in countless other sci-fi films and not the intelligent, belligerent humanoids of the comics. This development occurs centuries after the Eternals seemingly eradicated them from the face of the Earth.<\/p>

The Eternals, 10 in all, have gone their separate ways since then, encouraged by their majestic, compassionate leader Ajak<\/a> (Salma Hayek) to lead their own lives while they wait for the Celestials to return them to their home planet of Olympia. But the reemergence of the Deviants and other strange occurrences force them to reassemble. As the team reunites, old relationships, tensions, and grievances flare up while the team realizes that there may be more to their mission than they ever knew.<\/p>

Zhao, shooting with the same visual splendor of her previous films, yet also with more traditional compositions than those documentary-like outings required, crosscuts between the present day and a series of flashbacks that show the Eternals playing a shadow role in human history and debating just how much they can interfere in it (the rule: they can’t). We also learn the beginnings of the great romance between two of the group’s leaders, Sersi (Gemma Chan) and Ikaris (Richard Madden), an affair which has long cooled over the millennia, as well as the origins of the strange, dangerous madness that is slowly taking over the mind of powerful warrior Thena (Angelina Jolie<\/a>).<\/p>

Some of the Eternals seem to have adjusted well to life as retired superheroes, such as Sersi who works familiarly enough to superhero movie fans as a museum curator. She’s also romancing a fellow worker named Dane Whitman<\/a> (Kit Harington). Meanwhile Kingo (Kumail Nanjiani) has found an unusual way of creating and sustaining a career as a Bollywood star for the better part of a century. Weapons inventor Phastos (Brian Tyree Henry) has also settled down to a quiet life with his human family. But the most poignant might be Sprite (Liam McHugh), who’s trapped in the body of a 12-year-old and extremely resentful about it.<\/p>\n\t

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