This is an advance, spoiler-free review of Marvel's Eternals. The film premieres Nov. 5, 2021.
Eternals is sprawling — across scenery, across centuries, you name it. Director Chloé Zhao’s immortal epic dances across timelines and alliances with ease. Though, despite the spectacle of it all, the latest Marvel film falls victim to the old “just because you can doesn’t mean you should” in some areas. The depth of the story is coupled with the huge, sweeping landscapes that Zhao is known for, but when you’re focusing on such a huge, overarching story with an already impressive runtime, breathtaking but otherwise time-consuming nature shots can start to feel like a bit of a chore.
The story follows ten immortal beings throughout Earth’s history as they fight to protect the planet from the Deviants (they’re basically large, cranky, tentacle-y murder monsters, for those unfamiliar). Sersi, Ikaris, Kingo, Sprite, Phastos, Makkari, Druig, Thena, and Gilgamesh all follow their leader, Ajak, on their mission to serve the celestial Arishem. Each Eternal has their own unique powerset and, as you can imagine, their own special interpersonal drama within their complicated little family. While they don’t all get the same amount of screentime, you can imagine how tall of an order this film was by the main cast size alone. It’s joked that the team was the original Avengers a couple times in Eternals, which really helps drive home the wide arc that the story is trying to accomplish. The team of immortals may be interwoven in a way that you can’t really tell their origins individually, but imagine going into the first Avengers with no prior introduction to the team. That’s the insane task Zhao was given.
By and large, she rises to meet that challenge. We’re given a good grasp on the temperament and motivations of each of the ten with limited story bloat. If there’s an area where the team dynamic fails, it’s in the immortality of it all. Grave sins are committed throughout the story, all of which seem to be quickly forgiven and forgotten. This is likely to illustrate that holding a grudge gets boring after being alive for several centuries, but it gives their internal conflict less emotional impact.
Much of our time is spent with Sersi (Gemma Chan), Sprite (Lia McHugh), and Ikarus (Richard Madden), and the rest of the screen time is mostly balanced between the remaining seven Eternals. This is the most diverse cast in Marvel Studios history. That fact is exciting in and of itself, but one of the most fun aspects of the film is that you could be in a room full of ten people and each one of them could easily answer with a different favorite member of the team both from character and performance perspectives, as they’re all so vastly distinct with their own specific qualities. Thena (Angelina Jolie) filled that role for me, but it could have easily gone to Gilgamesh (Ma Dong-seok) or Kingo (Kumail Nanjiani) as well.
A not insignificant aside to the performance conversation is Disney and Marvel’s repeat offenses when it comes to queerness in their films. Eternals is the latest in a long list of Disney-related properties with the promise of queer representation, and we’re all tired. But this one’s gay! Actually, this time. For real. Brian Tyree Henry’s Phastos is a lovely, developed character with a real life and a loving family. The bar for the franchise’s LGBTQ representation is on the floor, and we’re not here to outline the exact happenings for spoiler reasons, but trust that this time the claims of a gay character is actually true. Better still, you can expect to be surprised by the intimacy of Zhao’s Eternals on multiple levels.
Eternals’ success as a film can almost entirely be attributed to the performances and relationships between characters. Their conflict and complicated connection to the human race makes for incredibly interesting subject matter. The grand scale of the galactic aspects of the story catches up quick, though. Once things shift past the Deviants and become more of a Celestial struggle, the story starts to rip at the seams. The problem is that it feels like there was truly no way for Zhao to succeed here. Scrapping some of her trademark grand landscape shots wouldn’t have made enough time for her to be able to connect us to these characters and give us the kind of grand finale that Marvel films are known for. Conversely, had their story been split into two films, the first one would have been called incomplete (not to mention the three-year gap that would have followed due to the MCU’s packed slate). An irresistible force meets an immovable object, and the collision results in what feels like superficial sparks.
In the end, these complicated gods feel like the most human of Marvel’s heroes. Perhaps it’s the diversity of their team, or their messy, messy, relationships. Either way, the humanity of it all has a real impact here. Karun (Harish Patel) — Kingo’s manager and the human we spend the most time with in the film — fits right in because they’re flawed in the exact same ways humanity is flawed. Also because he is incomparably brilliant and one of Eternals’ brightest spots, but that’s beside the point entirely!
Keep reading with our Venom: Let There Be Carnage Review.
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