I’ve gone on previously — most recently when discussing Halloween Kills — about the Marvel Cinematic Universe serving as big-budget, high-concept soap operas for modern audiences. There are moments when it feels like Eternals is fucking with me along those lines. Usually these films have some sort of grand McGuffin, some ancient artifact or exogoo that’s driving the narrative engine. Here we have Phastos (Brian Tyree Henry) — an ancient being of limitless power when it comes to innovation, technology and literally drawing component elements from the air and earth around him — who sets devices aside for a cutting quip or well-timed rejoinder. So call that an animating philosophy.
The thing about Eternals that confounds and enthralls is its insistence on foregrounding the emotional response to all the wild cosmic shit that’s happening. People have tasteful, PG sex in this film, and it’s just as important to the story as the slavering monsters laying waste to the supporting cast. I have no idea how the general public will respond to it. I’m well aware that some folks read my reviews with a giant “Do the Opposite of What This Guy Says” banner superimposed over it, and I’m OK with that. But this film has me flummoxed in a way that is kind of enthralling. There are world-shaking stakes and CG monster fights (obviously, this is a Marvel movie), but it has this interesting quality where it doesn’t feel like it was made in a warehouse festooned with green-screen material. Some of that comes from extensive location shooting, and some of it is thanks to an elastic tone that encompasses ancient themes and modern execution. But I never felt bored or alienated; even at its clunkiest, the film has the bewildering propulsiveness that makes for low-key addictive storytelling. You want to know where they’re going with all this.
Long story short: Giant Alien God makes ageless helperoids to be stewards of the earth, helping humanity along in its development with little nudges here and there. Of course, it gets more complicated than that (superhero cinema does love its twists), but you can start from there and be just fine. There are a couple of instances of trying to shoehorn our squad of Eternals into the larger Marvel universe with references to “The Blip” and some scattered talk of The Avengers, but it’s not important unless that 26-film-strong through-line is your foremost concern.
Like Dune, this is a several-hundred-million-dollar hangout film, and it’s got a fairly nurturing vibe. Most Marvel films for me are one-and-done. There are a few exceptions (Captain America: The Winter Soldier because of its overwhelmingly slashy vibes that made the whole MCU course-correct into shaky straight-people foolishness; the amazing Tony Leung wuxia dance fights in Shang-Chi; Iron Man Three when the Christmas season rolls around), but for the most part they propel the viewer forward through the channel prepared for them. Eternals, however, has that bowl-of-chili/bare-legs-under-a-comfy blanket feel — it’s a film you can spend time with without the plot getting in the way of the mood.
I delight in Kumail Nanjiani’s Kingo, who’s spent the past century becoming a family dynasty of Bollywood stars, for well-timed comic relief and reliable laser hands. It’s also kind of hysterical that with as much attention and discourse that sprung up around Nanjiani’s training program/low-carb glow-up, The Powers That Be didn’t devote similar resources to extensive dance training. But honestly, Harish Patel (as Kingo’s valet Karun) makes a remarkable impression, taking a role that could have easily been a bundle of stereotypes and finding some remarkably effective moments with it. At its best, the Kingo/Karun pairing has the potential of a Morris Day/Jerome Benton-style spinoff, which would be a license to print money.
I’d also like to take a moment to trip out on how Angelina Jolie can take a supporting role and turn it into something more captivating than any of the A plots. Yes, it’s Girl, Interrupted all over again, but here it’s worth noting that, like Brendan Fraser, Jolie made a point of learning the mechanics of how big-ticket effects movies work — the process of it all. Ever since 2004’s Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, she’s had this knack for meshing perfectly with the maelstrom of digital everything that defines so much of the modern blockbuster, and she shines, bending data to her presence before it’s even rendered. Her character Thena is a fierce warrior battling the early stages of dementia, and it’s such an unexpected turn — not that she’s figured out the character with the most viscerally captivating arc, but that she goes hard and finds a real, live beating heart in the midst of a cosmic picaresque.
I mentioned Henry’s Phastos earlier, and he’s also very good, giving the Disney/Marvel empire its first queer character who isn’t a marketing decoy or afterthought. (Note: The gay power in this film is so real that Russia has rated it 18-and-up, which is utterly ridiculous, but so is any place that hates gays but is fine with autocrats … and that applies to more of America than I’m comfortable with.) He actually has the most intriguing arc in the whole film, because he goes through it for and with humanity — there’s a scene in the wreckage of Hiroshima that would set off warning klaxons that could be heard for a three-theater radius were it not for the fact that Henry digs in completely and finds the heart of it. You just have to respect that kind of gutsy swing.
When the advance word about the Marvel machine choosing Oscar-winning Nomadland director Chloé Zhao for this film broke, I was genuinely intrigued. Directors come into the MCU with several previsualized CG sequences to work around, and we need only think back to the whole Edgar Wright/Ant-Man kerfuffle to remember how easily aesthetes can run into some corporate mandate bulwarks when heaps and heaps of money are on the line. Zhao changes up the program in her own way, much as James Gunn and Taika Waititi and Ryan Coogler have — broadening the scope of these films, finding resonance beyond awe and narrative reversals. It’s not a drastic enough change to freak out the faithful or demolish the formula, but it’s a pleasant enough experience, and its aesthetic instinct skews toward the pretty and expansive.
