(Image courtesy of Marvel Studios)
Marvel’s Eternals represents the Disney division’s biggest risk quite possibly ever — as the Marvel Cinematic Universe gears up for a new phase post-Endgame, the introduction of not one, not two, not three but an ensemble of ten new heroes and heroines represents the kind of risk that is likely to either soar or flop spectacularly. It obviously doesn’t hurt that the film arrives on the heels of director Chloe Zhao’s history-making Oscar wins for Nomadland earlier this year. But Eternals is the furthest thing from the brand of deliberately-paced, neorealistic arthouse fare for which Zhao first became known. The Gods have a verdict…
WADE MAJOR: Ray’s speculation (in a previous email exchange) was spot-on. Eternals is totally jumping the shark. Mark and I saw it and the more I think about it… the more I hate it. Man, what a mess…
There’s one common theme to all the “positive” reviews, and if you read between the lines what they’re really saying is, “Wow… Chloe Zhao really laid a stinker, but I would feel totally lame being the first critic to dump on her for her big, first post-Oscar tentpole so I’m going to say things like, ’This is a really different Marvel film! It has so many characters and she really did something, er, different… yeah! That’s it! It’s a different kind of Marvel film! With, uh… longer shots… and more characters… and more character development!”
Look. It sucks. I think Chloe is hugely talented, but this is a stinker and it’s not really her fault. Ray has some great thoughts on why — even if he hasn’t seen it yet — and I’d invite him to weigh in with that here. It’s quite interesting. But I’ll just say this at the outset — not being that familiar with the whole mythology of the Eternals, I found it — even by traditional Marvel standards — patently ridiculous. Not credible. And it’s even less credible when they shove it through what Tim calls “forced diversity.” This collection of “Eternals” who are presumably “created” by the super-powerful alien race of the “Celestials” really make me wonder how the Celestials have so much power. Because it’s a pretty ragtag bunch they created, apparently to “blend.. in” with the Earth or something? So one is a mute, another one is a forever teenager, another one is black and overweight and gay, another one has an Irish accent, another has a Scottish accent, another one is Asian but with a British accent, another one is South Asian but without an accent… another one (Angelina Jolie) is mentally unstable…
Oh, and they all have different powers? Why the hell not give them all the same powers? Why assign the same group to the whole earth for thousands of years? Why not have a different set of Eternals for every culture or every period of time?
I could go on forever like this. It’s just stupid. Especially after seeing Dune, this feels old, stale, amateurish, narratively sloppy and just… stupid. I hate it.
And the silly, “Where were you when Thanos was destroying half the universe?” question is answered with some moronic Eternals version of the Prime Directive? “Oh, that wasn’t part of our job description so we decided to sit the ultimate cataclysm out because our job is to fight oversized wildcats that look like dinosaurs.”
What the hell was (producer Kevin) Feige thinking? This thing is a turkey. Worst Marvel film since Iron Man 2, and maybe even worse than that.
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RAY GREENE: In a critical sense, I can’t be a part of a Tomato Slam for a movie I didn’t see. It wouldn’t be fair to the movie, which I might like eventually — assuming that we also accept the proposition that pigs may eventually fly, while singing “The Star-Spangled Banner” as monkeys fly out of their butts. You know, a typical Ron DeSantis press conference.
However:
I’ve always thought the source material was problematic here, which is why I sarcastically predicted in advance that The Eternals would possess the power to jump sharks. The original comics run laid an egg in the marketplace, and it has never been popular except with a certain strata of the comic book creative community, which is (justifiably) populated by Jack Kirby fanatics, who mostly admire these books for their visuals and splash pages. I read the books when they were new, and found them impossible to engage with — to me they felt like a retread of Kirby’s New Gods run at DC, which also flopped except with comics creatives, and which was similarly derived from the then popular idiocies being spouted by Erich Von Daniken in “nonfiction” works like CHARIOTS OF THE GODS and IN SEARCH OF ANCIENT ASTRONAUTS, about how god and goddess myths descended from sci-fi concepts rooted in reality. The original Kirby books are beautifully laid out and boringly written IMHO — they’re self serious, and they lack the humor, grace and democratic scaling of Stan Lee’s scripts for all the most well known Kirby “Silver Age” collaborations.
Not one of those original Eternals characters ever got anywhere near popular with the average fan — there is no Wolverine among them. Thanos, who is technically an Eternal/Deviant, didn’t even make his first appearance in an Eternals comic. His foe was Iron Man, and the Kirby mythos for the Eternals was borrowed so they wouldn’t have to make something up.
The X-Men are victims of their powers, and that makes them human-ish. The Eternals are gods fighting Gods and that makes them pioneers of the worst tendencies of current Marvel Cinematic Universe storylines, which is to dramatize top down stories where human beings are puny worriers on the sidelines and in the bleachers, who run and scream and die while “superior beings” create history. That’s not just boring to this puny human. It’s fascistic.
MARK KEIZER: Ray, please start a comic book blog, stat! I learned more about Kirby just now than from reading his actual work. Otherwise, I’m generally with Wade on this one. Marvel has taken a director of rare sensitivity and forced her into the superhero grinder, where only flecks of her emotionally textured, magic-hour romanticism remain. While I’m firmly on the side of Disney shareholders in not expecting Zhao to give us Justice League by way of Terrence Malick, Eternals represents a rather epic failure of nerve. There are moments where one can sense Zhao connecting with the emotional journeys of the film’s characters, mostly involving the on-again, off-again epoch-spanning romance between Sirse (Gemma Chan) and chisel-jawed Ikaris (Richard Madden) who looks and acts so much like Superman that one character calls him Superman. Sirse and Ikaris even share Marvel’s very first “they’re at least topless and probably having penetrative sex” sex scene, chaste as it is. Each shot of intertwined hands and meaningful gazes hopefully provided Zhao a sense of authorship otherwise denied her by the wham-bam-pow demands of the genre.
One of the surprising attributes of any Marvel team-based film is its ability to give every character his or her due, spreading around the memorable quips, heroic saves and emotion-packed moments so no superhero is left behind. That’s put to the test in Eternals, which features ten characters all starting from zero in terms of cultural recognition. Zhao does the best she can and, unsurprisingly, the film is at its best when these characters are in conflict with each other, whether its Phatos (Brian Tyree Henry) debating whether saving the universe is worth leaving his husband for or Druig (Barry Keoghan) whose mind control-powers would make Earth a peaceful paradise were he allowed to use them. But there are simply too many heroes to track and care about and too much convoluted backstory (when an opening crawl read “In the beginning…” my heart sank). Wade, of all the characters, did you care about any of them, even in the context of “sure, I’ll care about them for 2 hours and 37 minutes but that’s it”? And, Wade, what was the deal with Angelina Jolie? The biggest star here, she’s fairly wasted playing a character I vaguely understood and who would suddenly flip out and attack the group for reasons that seemed like a screenwriter’s conceit.
WADE MAJOR: I cared about none of them. And I share Ray’s reservations (on concept, as he hasn’t seen the film) about their “role” in human affairs. That’s basically doing 2001 in the most maudlin way possible. Where Kubrick and Clarke took very seriously the idea that human evolution may be “prompted” by alien intercession, Eternals makes the whole thing part of some gargantuan, intergalactic eugenics experiment wrapped in pop-philosophy and popcorn-authoritarianism. There are a lot of tropes here, none of which can be taken seriously given the silliness of the overall effort (the forced diversity and ham-handed melodramatic relationships across the eons etc.). For instance, all of this moping and moaning about the “burden” of being a superhero is getting tedious. We’ve been force fed that angst for decades now. WE GET IT. It’s tough being a hero! Okay, so step aside and let somebody else do it, then. By now there are more than enough of you. Once the X-Men are back in the fray, just step aside and take a vacation, whiners. Nobody needs a diva.
But there’s something else happening, which is kind of an organic thing, and that’s what I suggested earlier about Dune. The MCU is two decades in, now. And all good things come to an end. Especially when you’re hurling two and three of these films at us every year. You have to give audiences time to breathe. If there had been a Star Wars movie every year since 1977… nobody would want any more Star Wars. You start to gag on it. There’s a reason why, after nonstop westerns throughout the 50s and 60s, that by the 1970s Westerns are OVER. And we’ve never really gone back. My sense is that we’re just about up to our gills with Marvel movies and getting pretty close to cinematic lactose (or gluten) intolerance. Our movie metabolism is going to start to reject what we once loved just based on sensory overload alone. That process is especially expedited by “the next big thing” when it arrives because “the next big thing” suddenly hits our palette with that freshness that makes us realize there’s another universe of food out there. And we move on. Is Dune that palette cleanser? Maybe. Maybe not. We’ll see. What’s certain is that it’s making people ask the question — and it’s technically and narratively so much more sophisticated than something like Eternals that it’s almost like trying to watch an old Buck Rogers serial in the wake of Star Wars. You just can’t go back. And I don’t see ANOTHER Doctor Strange and ANOTHER Thor and A NEW Black Panther and ANOTHER Spider-Man as doing anything but dig that hole even deeper.
RAY GREENE: It’s interesting to note that superheroes were originally devised as a reaction against the idea of the Nazi ubermensch. In 1938, you had Hitler and Co. spouting their racist and anti-semitic hogspittle, and then you had Joe Shuster and Jerry Siegel saying, “Oh yeah?” They even called the first comic book superhero Superman (Ubermensch) as a great big kiss off to the toxic mythos of aryan supremacy. In addition to being a flying middle finger aimed at Adolph and co., I guess that makes Superman a golem too.
In the 1940s, Jack Kirby (who was born Jacob Kurtzberg) understood this secret history (or “code” as we’d call it today) very well. His first comic book smash was the co-creation of Captain America with Joe Simon — an all-American superman who was first seen punching Hitler in the face on the cover of Captain America #1 in March, 1941, nine months before Pearl Harbor, okay? And Kirby drew that image.
But thirty years later, Jack writes and draws The Eternals, and he’s disappeared into the comics paradigm so far that he’s all about supreme beings, in a way Stan Lee never was. It’s always seemed kind of sad to me.
WADE MAJOR: That’s a great observation. It’s also why the most compelling heroes are the average Joes and Jans who are unexpectedly called to be heroes and heroines — the whole Joseph Campbell “Luke Skywalker” hero’s journey — are kind of in the Joan of Arc mold, self-sacrificial for principle, not personal gain. The Eternals and all like them have that annoying Hercules complex. Which always bugged me in mythology. And it bugs me here. Oddly enough… the one Marvel hero who fits that mold but doesn’t bug me… is Thor. Not sure why. Maybe I just dig the hammer.
TIM COGSHELL: My contribution (also not having seen the film) is to ask the question — in the canon, who are the Eternals? What is and has always been their nature and purpose? And is there any reason why, in this movie, they are different from whom they’ve always been or engaged in something different than they were conceived to do?
I am not sure what percentage of the fan base of the MCU care about such things anymore. I know that this incarnation of the MCU (and starting with Captain Marvel) is directed at a younger audience than the one that came to a close with Endgame. I know that audience loves this direction. Thus the success of Captain Marvel and Shang-Chi and the Legend of The Ten Rings.
None of those movies or Eternals or any of the films in the new MCU are for “us”. They are for our kids and in some cases our grandkids. Yeppers.
RAY GREENE: I’m an American. I reserve my twin rights to think I rule the world and to never grow up. All at the same time.
MARK KEIZER: Tim, I’m going to give these kids today some credit and predict they will tolerate this movie, but not embrace it or its characters. The Eternals are mostly defined by their powers which are marginally different from one another but don’t seem particularly appropriate for their primary goal: to protect Earth from the Deviants, which are standard-issue 4-legged monsters that never seem so threatening to humanity that the all-powerful Celestials would need to create a group of ageless superheroes for the sole purpose of fighting them. If these Celestials were really so powerful, they’d just destroy all the Deviants themselves and spare us this movie. The only Eternal who breaks through in any 1.5-dimensional way is Kingo (Kamail Nanjiani) who shoots bolts out of his fingers and has spent centuries since the supposed defeat of the Deviants as a Bollywood star. When the Eternals reunite to take on the resurgent Deviants he brings along rotund videographer, Karum (Harish Patel, the funniest thing in the movie) to record his exploits for a documentary. But circling back to Tim’s original question, it’s true that Feige might be positioning this and subsequent phases of the MCU to better reflect what younger audiences want to see: superheroes who are Black or blind or gay or of non-White descent. And that’s a wonderful thing as long as it doesn’t come off as box-checking. And actually I’d argue it’s a wonderful thing even if it does come off as box-checking because, well, you’ve gotta start somewhere and here the Otherness of the Eternals takes a backseat to their superpowers and whoever gets the most heroic camera angle as they take down a Deviant.
This question is for the group: if Feige really wanted to lock in audiences wary of investing in another 10 years of MCU epics, wouldn’t he have been better off adapting another team-based comic like Fantastic Four or X-Men? Feige’s been pushing this idea that the Eternals are critical to the MCU because the entire universe starts with these characters. That sounds like a weak selling point. Audiences want characters they know and love on the big screen and characters they can emotionally invest in. Eternals provides neither. If Eternals were Fantastic Four, wouldn’t that have been way more exciting?
If Feige nails Fantastic Four, X-Men and a Black Panther 2 without Chadwick Boseman, that’ll put a charge back into the MMP (Marvel Master Plan). I agree that nothing is quite like your first love and Avengers: Endgame played that role to perfection. But we can still fall in love again when the right person (or corporate IP) comes along. To my nonstop amazement (actually my amazement stopped with Eternals) Marvel has done a terrific job finding additional corners of their sandbox to explore as in the 70’s paranoia-infused Captain America: The Winter Soldier, the naughty space-romp that is Guardians of the Galaxy and the post-Avengers: Age of Ultron palette-cleanser of a heist flick, Ant-Man. Eternals, on the other laser-shooting hand, would have been better served playing in an entirely different sandbox especially with Chloé Zhao directing. Truly, everything that works about Eternals is thanks to Zhao. Everything that doesn’t work is thanks to the Marvel machine that stripped this Oscar-winning director of most everything that made her worth hiring in the first place.
WADE MAJOR: I’m the first person to give Feige props for what he’s pulled off — with very few hitches. The guy went from producer’s assistant to studio head to “most successful producer” in motion picture history inside of a decade and a half. That’s unprecedented.
But… Eternals feels like he handed them his dream wishlist of bullet points to trigger all the storylines and tentpoles for this new phase — and it was too much. No way to make it all work. But nobody went back and said, “Mr. Feige… this is unwieldy and unworkable. How about we just blow off the whole Eternals thing and do it this way…” because nobody in Hollywood wants to speak truth to power. That’s always been a problem, but it’s now also a problem for Marvel. Eternals can’t be undone, and I believe it’s dug them a really terrible hole.
RAY GREENE: Well, Wade if you’re right, and the MCU is now having Star Wars-like feature film problems, I have another prediction to make, in the form of a wager:
If Iron Man and Captain America are still dead and retired in five years, I will make like Werner Herzog and eat a shoe.
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