Movie Review: Eternals

Following the first two films of Phase Four of the Marvel Cinematic Universe – Black Widow and Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings – earlier this year, the MCU, having apparently exhausted the current universe of heroes, now embarks – with Eternals – on telling the tale of a new team of heroes who are, in actuality, ancient aliens that have been coexisting with humans for thousands of years subtly guiding and protecting the planet and it inhabitants from those that may cause it harm. Now, the old foes of the Eternals, the Deviants, have surfaced again in an attempt to gain control of the world, forcing the Eternals themselves to emerge from hiding to battle their fiercest enemy.

Director Chloé Zhao – whose last film, Nomadland (2020), took home the Oscars for Film, Actress, and director as well as a host of other awards – does an admirable job keeping the varying storylines flowing and giving all of the characters their own individual moments in the sun, but there is simply too much going on here for it to not all be lost amidst a verbose screenplay that should more than likely have been split into two films and provided with a clearer direction and better defined, well, endgame.

The script, written by Zhao, along with Ryan and Kaz Firpo, is charged with creating an entire universe and introducing all of the heroes and villains within said universe within a three-hour timeframe. It is a monumental task that it is not up to. There is simply far too much here to unpack for it to be given any genuine narrative consequence.

That causes the plethora of characters to get lost, or remain underdeveloped, amid so many tangential storylines. While Gemma Chan’s Sersi is the ostensible hero of the tale, there are numerous other characters that are sadly shorted in lieu of telling her story. Again, this is possibly something that could have been alleviated by breaking the story up somewhat or possibly giving a little less time to one character’s backstory than another. In short, there are too many characters in need of too much attention to keep things moving at an effective enough pace to maintain an interesting enough through line for very long.

Richard Madden and Gemma Chan in “Eternals.” © Sophie Mutevelian, Marvel Studios 2021. All Rights Reserved.

In an effort to establish her as the hero, Sersi is given a love interest in the form of Dane Whitman (Kit Harington) and while this makes her more relatable and less “god-like,” it doesn’t succeed in making her, or her story, any more compelling than it already is. Even a subplot involving the supposed corruption of the powers of one of the Eternals – Thena (Angelina Jolie) – is brought up and promptly forgotten until it is required to propel the narrative toward its inevitable, unsatisfying, conclusion. As the leader of the Eternals, Salma Hayek’s Ajak, is similarly given very little to do other than show up at the appropriate time in order to move Sersi’s story forward. So too are other characters utilized as stepping stones from scene to scene.

Although the film is often quite beautiful to look at, courtesy of fine work by cinematographer Ben Davis as well as that of production designer Eve Stewart, there is often little else compelling this film to move from one minute to the next until reaching its final running time of an overlong 157 minutes.

As the MCU enters its fledgling Phase Four, the latest offering of Eternals to the series seems to suggest that perhaps the sheer scope of the project was far too great to sustain interest and, in fact, entertain throughout and that a return to simpler one-off adventures of single heroes will better serve the series moving forward.

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Mike Tyrkus

Editor in Chief at CinemaNerdz.com

An independent filmmaker, co-writer and director of over a dozen short films, the Editor in Chief of CinemaNerdz.com has spent much of the last three decades as a writer and editor specializing in biographical and critical reference sources in literature and the cinema, beginning in February 1991 reviewing films for his college newspaper. He was a member of the Detroit Film Critics Society, as well as the group's webmaster and one-time President for over a decade until the group ceased to exist. His contributions to film criticism can be found in Magill's Cinema Annual, VideoHound's Golden Movie Retriever (of which he was the editor for nearly a decade until it too ceased to exist), the International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers, and the St. James Film Directors Encyclopedia (on which he collaborated with editor Andrew Sarris). He has also appeared on the television program Critic LEE Speaking alongside Lee Thomas of FOX2 and Adam Graham, of The Detroit News. He currently lives in the Detroit area with his wife and their dogs.

@miketyrkus

Mike Tyrkus

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