Aretha Franklin is honestly the gift that will continue to keep on giving. It’s not just her timeless music and advocacy, but her sharp wit and humor. Take for instance the immortal quote she offered when asked about a specific pop star: “Great gowns…beautiful gowns.” Who knew that it could be applied not only to singer songwriters, but to films like Eternals as well?
Eternals tells the story of a group of individuals who 7,000 years ago were sent by the Celestials to defend Earth from the Deviants. These creatures are hellbent on devouring sentient life and thus the Eternals have been dispatched to different worlds over the course of time to thwart them. After first contact, the Eternals mission shifts to help foster humanity’s growth. However, much like any other group of people with conscious thoughts, they encounter differences and break up, scattering across the world. Now in the present day, they have found themselves in their living their own lives. Sersei (Gemma Chan) is living in London with Sprite (Lia McHugh) and dating Dane Whitman (Kit Harrington). When a Deviant attacks them, Sersei reunites with Ikaris (Richard Madden) her past love and the group sets off to round up the other Eternals (Salma Hayek, Don Lee, Angelina Jolie, Brian Tyree Henry, Lauren Ridloff, Barry Keoghan, Kumail Nanjiani to fight against the Deviant threat.
Eternals, written by Chloe Zhao, Patrick Burleigh, Ryan Firpo, and Kaz Firpo, is one of the year’s most confounding films. The movie is equal parts fun dysfunctional family and cosmic, yet earthbound action movie. There’s lots of competing elements and characters and actors that need attention and the movie tries to accommodate everything. Unfortunately, this leaves the movie feeling rather thin, which is shocking considering the run time. There’s absolutely nothing wrong without telling a simple story, in fact it’s quite commendable to just execute a forward marching narrative. Eternals is thin because has to serve many masters and in doing so, doesn’t dedicate the time to exploring the many interesting existential questions it brings up. Now that Marvel is past the Infinity War saga, they’ve gone weirder and more cosmic, and as such have introduced new parameters and topics to the MCU. But what good is just stating a question if you don’t want to dig into it? For a movie with this long of a run time and this story, it makes these bigger interesting topics feel like nothing more than window dressing. This type of storytelling then trickles down into the plot where the villain feels unimportant due to them just being CGI monsters and certain character beats feel unmoored, explored in the least interesting way. This is a movie about a family for lack of a better word and as such they all have gone their different ways for different reasons. However, we never quite get a sense as to why characters do some of what they do outside of knowing the story needs them to; hell one of the best performers in the movie is absent for the final battle when the crux of the story is these characters needing to come together. There are so many odd choices being made that even when you have an actor of the caliber of Angelina Jolie, I briefly wondered why she took the part 20 minutes into the film (For what it’s worth you do end up seeing why someone like her would take the part, but it’s still disappointing). Some of the actors do make significant impressions, Gemma Chan, Lia McHugh and Lauren Ridloff chief among them, but it almost feels they had to deliver great performances against the movie rather than with.
But this might be part and parcel with a story that requires beings without humanity to wrestle with their growing consciousness and feelings for humanity. The characters can talk about how they were instructed to stay out of human affairs, but often times the script feels as though it can’t truly dig into the characters as much as it would like to. Take for instance the moment that seems to be igniting social media, of Phastos in Hiroshima after the atomic bomb was dropped crying about how he is responsible for what happened (he’s the tech guy inventor of the group). It’s not out of character that Phastos might feel dejected given how his designs and technology have aided in humanity’s growth, but using this moment gets to the problem Eternals has in that it’s just window dressing for extreme effect and a little too close to fandom jokes about where heroes were during moments of history. It’s ghoulish because it’s a real moment of devastation for a group of people and made all the worst because it’s got one character (the Black and gay one mind you) taking all the blame. Regardless of the fact that he is an Eternal, this seems so silly to need to dedicate time to a flashback, when simply saying the character gave up on humanity would have been enough. The sheer weight of atrocities humanity have committed, especially via technology, would be enough. The old adage of show don’t tell is true, but only if you have something worth showing.
It’s a shame these elements don’t work in the story, because the movie is doing some really interesting things visually. I think in terms of action, this movie is perhaps the cleanest of the recent MCU movies. Director Chloe Zhao has a strong understanding of the powers of these characters and how to use them individually and as a team on the screen. Her insistence on using real locations and focus on shooting at certain parts of the day give the movie a really fascinating visual palette, seamlessly blending the “Marvel aesthetic” and her own creative sensibilities. But pretty images can only go so far and Eternals can’t quite rise to its own formidable goals.