"Eternals" is a movie of grand sweep. The story it tells begins in Mesopotamia in 5000 B.C. and concludes in the present day. By the end of the picture's talky two and a half hours, you may feel like you've lived through those seven millennia in real time.
Marvel is surely to be congratulated for spending $200 million on a film of such assertive diversity. The 10-member team of the title includes actors whose roots range from British Chinese (Gemma Chan) to Korean (Ma Dong-seok) and Pakistani American (Kumail Nanjiani). There's also one Mexican actor (Salma Hayek), one Black and Mexican actor, and, what the hey, a couple of Celts (Richard Madden and Barry Keoghan). One of the characters (Brian Tyree Henry) is gay, another (Lauren Ridloff) is deaf, and three have survived the trauma of being gender-swapped (males in the comics, now females in the film). In addition, there's Angelina Jolie, as a woman of many weapons, who unbalances the picture a bit with her vivid, big-star presence.
Chinese director Chloe Zhao, who won an Oscar for her luminous 2020 movie "Nomadland," was a nervy pick to helm a gigantoid MCU action-fantasy film. Sadly, though, the gamble of hiring her has not paid off; making a Marvel movie may require an enthusiasm for bombast that she doesn't possess (and may never again need, unless a clearly hoped-for sequel to this film comes to pass, and she's called back into service).
The story is an unintriguing muddle. A long, long time ago — a million years ago, in fact — a shadowy group of space beings called Celestials created two new races on Earth: the noble Eternals and the disgusting Deviants. The Eternals took it upon themselves to gently guide the human race (without interfering in its affairs, which could have triggered a Butterfly Effect) and to protect it from the Deviants. The Deviants — who look like snarling armatures for half-finished monsters — took it upon themselves to rampage and rend flesh wherever possible.
After rather a lot of globe-trotting through history (hello Mesopotamia!), we learn that there's been a mysterious absence of Deviants for quite a while, and that the underemployed Eternals are now retired. In London, one of them, Sersi (Chan), is working as a museum curator and maintaining a relationship with a boyfriend named Dane (Kit Harrington). Then a Deviant suddenly erupts onto the scene, in the usual violent way, and Sersi's high-flying ex, Ikaris (Madden), who could only be called Supermanly, arrives to demonstrate that he can still shoot cosmic rays out of his eyes and to announce that it's time to get the Eternals back together. An early stop is to pick up Kingo (Nanjiani), who can fling fireballs from his fingers and is now a big shot on the Bollywood filmmaking scene. (Nanjiani brings some spirit to the movie, and you may wish there was more of him in it.)
It doesn't take long before you begin to realize that there are too many damn superheroes in this picture, and that the occasional mentions of the Avengers (the story is said to be taking place five years after the big Thanos snap that wiped out half the universe) are probably unwise. The Avengers were a ton of wisecracking fun compared to the semi-obscure, C-team crew we see here, and it would probably be best not to mention them anywhere in the vicinity of this movie. It doesn't help that Zhao's naturalistic lighting tends to muffle whatever snap and sparkle the movie might have had. And while it's nice to have all the progressive representation on screen that we see here, it remains to be determined whether people are willing to pay for it, when all they really want is to see a good movie. Which this one, alas, isn't.
Kurt Loder is the film critic for Reason Online. To find out more about Kurt Loder and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators website at www.creators.com.
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