Eternals review: the Marvel universe reaches its limits

Chloe Zhao Movie 2020 Nomadland It starts with a few lines of text that make up a whole world of losses. A gypsum plant in the royal city of Empire, Nevada, closes in January 2011. Within six months, Empire’s zip code is discontinued. It is a ghost town. A stable-looking environment is revealed to be constantly changing, sometimes with terrifying and destabilizing speed.

Eternal, Zhao’s continuation of his acclaimed Oscar-winning film, also begins with an explanatory text. This time, however, it’s more of a story than a story, about beings from another planet brought to ours for a purpose that audiences won’t fully understand until the end of the film. It is to retain and not to invite, as if, from the beginning, there were two forces at war over the type of film. Eternal It should be.

The latest Marvel Studios movie is a piece of the puzzle and an experiment in equal measure. Eternal It expands the boundaries of the MCU by providing clues as to what its future may hold while also being a project of formal ambition. Zhao deliberately breaks with Marvel’s well-established formula to tell a larger, more mature story – the kind of story the filmmaker is known for. The script takes the kind of seismic changes that can happen around us in six brief months and blows them up on a geological scale over thousands of years, through the eyes of the most consciously diverse cast in a blockbuster of Superheros. EternalYet ultimately he becomes haunted by that formula, continually yielding to the familiar every time he tries to show us something new.

Eternal It also has one of the densest premises in Marvel Comics history, a relative anomaly in the vast stable of memorable characters created by comic book legend Jack Kirby. Even the considerably streamlined film version can’t lay the groundwork without plenty of exposure: The Eternals, the film’s opening text describes, are superhuman champions from a world called Olympia, sent to Earth by a cosmic god named Arimesh, a celestial. , in order to defend humanity from the monstrous Deviants. Throughout history, the Eternals have been here, helping humanity by fighting the Deviants and providing technological advancements slowly, to some degree. Because the Eternals have another mandate: they cannot interfere in earthly conflicts that do not involve the Deviants.

This is the reason the movie gives, in actual conversation, between characters, for The Eternals to control Thanos’ genocidal rampage or any of the horrors and atrocities of the past. It’s a bit hard to swallow, especially when the movie goes to great lengths with special effects to depict historical moments of mass destruction. To movie credit, part of Eternal The narrative arc is its characters struggling with the morality of this mandate. The misfortune of posing this dilemma to characters who live for thousands of years is quite simple: the longer characters take to let horrible things happen before doing something about it, the more they seem foolish.

Today, however, it is fairly easy for the Eternals to follow this command. All Deviants on Earth have been wiped out, but instead of being offered a ticket to their home, Olympia, they have effectively been abandoned by their god and gone their separate ways, living in secret among the people of Earth. . The exhibition stops and the action begins when Sersi (Gemma Chan) and Sprite (Lia McHugh), who live in London as a teacher and an (eternal) 12-year-old girl, respectively, are attacked by a not-so-extinct Deviant. which also seems strong enough to kill the Eternals. When Superman-style Ikaris (Richard Madden) arrives to help fend off the Deviant, a mini Eternals reunion turns into a full-blown road trip to reunite the family and find out what’s going on with the Deviants.

From here, Eternal it becomes a hybrid travel tale and a historical epic. As Sersi, Ikkaris, and Sprite reunite with their seven other “brothers” around the world, the film goes back to pivotal moments in their time on Earth, reflecting on their relationships between them and humanity. They are in Mesopotamia in 5000 BC. C., beginning the Bronze Age; then they are in Babylon in 575 BC sowing the wonders of the Hanging Gardens; Then they are in 1575 Mexico watching in shock as the genocidal Spanish colonists murder the people of Tenochtitlan. Crossing from one era to another, Zhao begins to emphasize the place more than anything else, even the action scenes seem to fade into the background, a momentary interruption of the Eternals’ interpersonal drama as they question their role in the places. that surround them. . They fall in love and fall out of love with each other and with humanity. They meet and are rejected by their god, Arishem the Celestial. They spend most of the movie in doubt, not knowing what to do or believe.

But Eternal he is contemplative to the extreme. Every time a new character is introduced, the ones we’ve met before retell the story, and the same agreements and disagreements develop. In the best moments, Zhao allows the film to breathe around its most accomplished characters, such as Kingo (Kumail Nanjiani) who has settled in life as a Bollywood star and joins because he wants to turn the adventure into a documentary about him. saving. the world with their ridiculously powerful finger guns. Less bombastic but equally compelling is Phastos (Brian Tyree Henry), the inventor of Eternal who, out of guilt for accelerating human technology towards possible atomic warfare, has retreated to a quiet domestic life with his human husband and son in The suburbs.

The film’s cast is too large to give each character a satisfying arc, but the film script by Zhao, Patrick Burleigh, Ryan Firpo, and Kaz Firpo spends most of the film’s running time on its less compelling characters. . Sersi, with her vague power to transmute inanimate matter from one form to another, most effectively displayed when she turns a speeding bus into rose petals, is the de facto protagonist, but also apathetic: she struggles between her life pretending to be deadly and dating her historian boyfriend Dane (Kit Harington) and her grand purpose, which she begins to question, but only when she is forced to. It’s almost as if the Eternals take their vote of non-intervention so seriously that they also refuse to push the movie’s plot.

Much has been made of what Chloé Zhao brings to the MCU as a filmmaker, in large part because of Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige raving about her insistence that Eternal be filmed in real locations, and not heavily on green screen soundstages, as many Marvel movies are. The result is distinctive, but also strangely empty. It’s as if, to satisfy the needs of a Marvel blockbuster, Eternal He could only stage his action in the most arid of natural environments: a beach, a forest, a desert. Venues large and open enough for a soundstage to be approached, even if reluctantly. When the time comes for the film’s naturalism to give way to artificial action, the result is surprisingly demure: With one spectacular exception at the end, the action in Eternals is quite small; a strange contrast to its great reach. When the heroes “dress up” for their final fight, he almost feels bad or reluctant.

The pat descriptors Marvel execs like Kevin Feige add to MCU movies don’t hang as well Eternal. Genre shorthand does a poor job of conveying what a viewer should expect. There are no heists, no spying, no strange new worlds or hidden fantasy realms. Eternal it’s a meandering movie about being away from your family, and how hard it is to pick up the stones to finally see them again. It is two and a half hours full of people of many thousands of years going from one place to another and talking about the good times.

After more than a decade of mastering the MCU formula, it’s easy to go wrong Eternal‘depth deviation. Movies that struggle with difficult experiences can often be difficult to watch, and intentionally. Unfortunately, Eternal it is not daring, just incongruous. The simplest explanation is more true: Eternal It’s a mess.

It is a film that tries to convey scale, about great ideas and forces that move in a geological calendar beyond any life. He struggles with a moral that extends beyond the considerations of a person or a planet, with a purpose when time and distance are almost meaningless. The departure of Marvel bets and protests in these conditions. The company’s plot-driven blockbusters are overwhelmingly preoccupied with the present and, possibly, to a greater extent, what’s next.

Eternal consider where we are, where we have been, and how much, if at all, has changed us. These are largely internal ideas that don’t easily translate into superhuman fights in dark settings, where the beauty of the natural world is just a blank canvas for lasers and blows. Every fight is like a rope pulling Eternal back to the ground when I would rather fly. Every scene that exposes the cosmology of the MCU does more for the movies we haven’t seen yet than the one we’re watching.

Movies can be big enough for ideas like this: difficult conversations of cosmic significance without a clear answer, angry confrontations with an indifferent god, and whether or not our moral compass should change as our perspective and scope grows. But a movie must create a world in which those questions matter, for its characters and its audience. In a few short lines, Zhao did that with Nomadland. Eternalhowever, it is not big enough. Or maybe the Marvel Cinematic Universe is too small.

Eternal opens in theaters on Friday, November 5.