Eternals - Well, that sucked

I firmly believe that the Marvel Cinematic Universe up until 2019 was one of the greatest American cinematic achievements of all time. It took a sprawling comic-book mythos and made it into a compelling series of many films that all coalesced in a grand, heart-wrenching finale in a way that no-one has been able to achieve before or since. It has inspired great appreciation from fans and has helped turn many towards the superhero genre and to filmmaking in general.

Post-2019, Marvel, under the weight of Disney, has lost that 12-year plan and that compelling sense of wonder. Already, in 2021 alone, Disney has taken the license and flogged out 4 TV shows and 3 movies, barely any of which are recommendable. It’s reduced a great cinematic achievement to a checklist and a money machine, with no quality control or care for its media. And Eternals is what I hope the final step will be for this path before fans have had enough.

Even before its mixed critical reception, I wasn’t looking forward to the experience of Eternals. I was concerned at the choice of Chloé Zhao as director, as despite loving her previous film Nomadland, her homespun, unique style of filmmaking seemed entirely at odds with the plasticity and overcomplicated MCU story. And the trailers – simply put – looked godawful.

And I was absolutely right to be concerned. Eternals gets so much wrong as a superhero movie, as a fantasy legend, as an ensemble piece and even just as a basic film that I’m astonished some of the stuff within made it to theatres. Hell, there are actually typos in the main credits when the “Screenplay by” frame comes up and they accidentally put the director’s name in twice, where it reads “written by Chloé Zhao and Chloé Zhao”!

My complaints with this movie come in 4 key areas – aesthetics, structure, characters/performances, and the central narrative. All of these are broken in some way, and important to discuss as it seems that Disney has completely forgotten how the previous MCU movies pulled this stuff off so well.

So, let’s start with…

Aesthetics

Before release, many people were hyping up the choice of Chloe Zhao as director, as they believed her eye for cinematography (with Nomadland nominated for an Oscar in that category) would result in the most unique-looking Marvel film we’ve gotten to this point. As someone who has actually seen this movie in a theatre, yes, this does have the pretty landscape shots Zhao is known for – and that’s it in terms of aesthetic appeal.

Cinematography-wise, there are indeed many cool shots of sunsets and fire that gave me minor pause, but it’s offset by the fact that there are also numerous scenes – especially the action sequences – where it’s so dark as to be impenetrable. Not helping this is that the main monsters of the film are coloured dark-grey, meaning that the low-lighting makes them difficult to spot in the blur of superhero shenanigans.

What I feel a lot of people don’t recognize about movie aesthetics in general is that it isn’t just about cinematography or CGI – it’s an overall combination of cinematography, costumes, set design, makeup and visual effects that form an overall visual appeal. Eternals invests all of its chips into cinematography, but not the other areas of aesthetic, and the movie just looks…bad.

So much of the production and costume design in this movie consists of bright colours that look like they’ve had dirt rubbed over them for 3 years, Kurosawa-style. This has the effect of dampening the visual appeal of the costumes, as they blur more and look purposefully faded out, but not in the cool Minority Report way.

And if they were trying to make these alien costumes look realistic by fading them this way, then they failed at that too, because so much of the film is set in real environments where they look absolutely ridiculous. On the topic of those environments, whose idea was it to set a Marvel movie on the most boring looking beach in the history of humanity? It just looks so brown and asinine and lifeless.

Go back and watch Endgame, or Thor: Ragnarok, or GotG. You’ll see a perfect blending of costumes, environments and cinematography that serve to complement each other rather than contrast each other. Eternals somehow doesn’t know this basic lesson of superhero filmmaking, but it gets even worse when we get to…

Structure

MCU films have a fairly familiar structure – there’s an opening action scene, some backstory for each main character, a quick bonding action/training scene, a scene of curiosity/exposition, 1 to 3 big blow-up fight scenes, Encino Man breakup and get-together, then final fight, end credits. It’s an old formula, but it’s reliable, and every Marvel movie has used this structure, even the bad ones.

Eternals admirably tries to depart from formula, but its way of doing so is ridiculous and gets in its own way. Instead of feeling like a constant journey over a reliable road in a car, it feels like Eternals consists of multiple small islands, which you have to drive through the sea to get to, until the end of the film where you just crash into Australia for half-an-hour.

The biggest problem with Eternals is without a doubt its length. It is 157 minutes long, which is frickin’ ridiculous – it’s longer than David Fincher’s Zodiac, the original Blade Runner and even Batman vs. Superman. It also does nothing to justify that length either – another movie that came out in the same month as Eternals, Michael Sarnoski’s Pig, is 66 minutes shorter and explores three times the thematic depth and character development, easy. (By the way, go see Pig. It’s incredible)

Much of Eternals length can be attributed to its compulsive need to explain every single plot element in excruciating detail, even stuff which has already been established in the MCU. Hell, this movie has a Blade Runner opening crawl spelling out the entire premise of the movie, and I don’t mean a cool Star Wars opening with cool font and music – I mean a dead silent black screen with slowly scrolling letters written in the cheapest font found in Microsoft Word.

This is the Blade Runner one, not Eternals.

Not only is this explaining condescending, as the audience is far smarter than what’s assumed of us here, but it removes the time this movie desperately needs for character development and action. There’s so little real character development as most of it comes in flashbacks devoted mainly to characters standing around and expositing, and there’s barely any action in the film. I mean it. Zilch.

For reference, timing with my phone, by the time the first 5-minute action sequence ended – not counting the opening and small skirmishes that can’t be called a sequence – AN HOUR AND TWENTY-ONE MINUTES HAD PASSED. And following that, there’s only one other action sequence in the entire film! By comparison, Doctor Strange is 42 minutes shorter and establishes far more in the context of the MCU, and not including the opening, it has 4 distinct action sequences – TWICE as many as Eternals!

You could say that Eternals exposition-heavy script and complete dearth of action is for the intention of providing a character piece and deconstruction of the superhero, as some of the film’s defenders have claimed. But those characters and deconstructions better be good in the context of the film, and…they aren’t.

Performances and characterisation

Eternals shoots itself in the foot by having TEN protagonists. There’s really not much else I can say here.

Oh alright, I’ll elaborate. Because there are TEN protagonists, none of them get suitable development time at all. It’s that simple. So much of this movie is devoted to backstory, exposition and waffle that nobody gets to grow. They all come across like sentient blocks of wood whose only character trait is to stand still and smoulder sexily into the distance, which they do an inordinate amount of times. Seriously, I can’t tell you anything about any of them that isn’t just backstory.

The key issue here is definitely the structure of the film for wasting so much time, but what’s also important to note here is the performances. Many films these days make the annoying mistake of confusing “charisma” with “comic relief”, and so only give their comic relief characters any human traits while leaving the main protagonists as stone-faced mono-motivated robots. The MCU, the DCEU, the Star Wars prequels, Raya and the Last Dragon (another Disney property) – they really churn this formula out.

This is especially true for Eternals, whose 10 protagonists – including Salma Hayek, Angelina Jolie, Richard Madden and Kumail Nanjiani – never come across as charismatic. The only cast member who comes off as naturally charismatic and not just comic relief is Ma Dong-Seok (A.K.A. Don Lee), who exudes such a natural cantankerous dad energy that he doesn’t need to emphasise it with jokes.

Our two main leads, Gemma Chan and Richard Madden, are complete blank slates. They speak in moderate tones, stare into the distance, have a PG sex scene, and otherwise go with the same bland expression every time. I haven’t seen Gemma Chan in anything outside of Eternals, but with Richard Madden’s 1 minute of screen-time in 1917, he conveyed miles more characterisation and charisma than in the 2-and-a-half-hours of Eternals.

Much of this stiffness is due to Zhao’s direction, which when it comes to scenes of exposition and camaraderie, compels actors to stand completely still and talk to each other in monotone only. There’s no dynamism, fast-moving exposition, or anything particularly poppy about it – this is the direction porn actors are given in the basic setup.

The solution to this? Zhao should have cut half of these characters and said “screw diversity potential. Creepy teen from Killing of a Sacred Deer? Shove it. Unnecessarily huge Kumail Nanjiani? Bye-bye. Dad from Train to Busan whose unintentionally the best part? Sorry, but see ya. Nonsensical Lauren Ridloff character? (Personal note: Learn ASL for leave).”

That way, the movie could have given time for real development and let Zhao focus on building the charisma of each main character. She didn’t cut, of course, because Disney wanted to boast their diversity standards.

But now, let’s get to the big tomalia…

The screenplay

Thankfully, Eternals is not the worst Marvel film by a looooooong margin (*cough* Fant4stic *spleh* New Mutants *wheeze* Ghost Rider) – but it is the worst film in the MCU, and especially due to its awful, awful screenplay.

I haven’t seen a movie since Thunder Force in February (shudder) that had as many plot holes, inane dialogue, forgotten story points, laughable declarations and ridiculous sequel baits. It was written by 4 people, who clearly didn’t bother to go over the draft version and just turned it in awkwardly, probably expecting that someone else would come up with cool ideas to make it sleeker and more efficient. They didn’t.

I’ve already discussed major issues with the script like structure, characterisation and ludicrous length, but more fundamentally, it just doesn’t make any sense. No single element of the narrative makes any sense whatsoever or at least is not sufficiently explained. Hell, not even the ties to the greater MCU make any sense, since the movie sort of hand-waves that away before contradicting itself on why these heroes have never bothered to help the Avengers save Earth from Thanos.

What really doesn’t make sense is the backstory behind the heroes themselves. Not only is the script unbelievably self-contradicting (often in the same scene, Birdemic-style), but when the big plot twist is revealed (NO SPOILERS) it completely undermines any sense of threat or danger, because it not only reveals that our characters are essentially unkillable, but it reveals the villain’s plan to be completely and confoundingly stupid. I audibly went in the theatre “what the fuck?!” when it happened.

About those contradictions, there are just so many. For instance, Gemma Chan’s character can change the molecules of anything into other substances like metal and WOOD, BUT she says that she cannot transform organic matter. BUT WOOD IS LITERALLY THE MOST BASIC ORGANIC MATTER OUT THERE! And later in the film, she demonstrates her “non-organic affecting” powers by turning rocks into birds and rose petals – the script forgot the rules it literally just set up to prevent her from just killing the bad guy and ending the film!

Then outside the screenplay, there are just so many dumb filmmaking errors, like the insane continuity mistakes like when Gemma Chan falls into a 5-metre deep pool, but then Richard Madden gets in and it only comes to his knees! Or how the scenes set in Ancient Babylon have them speaking modern Arabic (obvious to anyone who knows even some Arabic) which didn’t even exist in the time period or region!

Or how about the scene where it’s clear Dong-seok thought the take was over, so he then looks DIRECTLY at the camera before realising his mistake and quickly looking AWAY WHAT THE HELL HAPPENING NICE CAR THE JESUS DAMN!

Catharsis.

Yeah, this was a really, really, REALLY bad superhero movie. I struggle to think why Disney released it like this, I struggle to think how so many good actors and filmmakers turned out something like this, and I struggle to comprehend the legions of people on Letterboxd who somehow defend this film. My god.

Eternals gets a D.

So that’s 7 meh-to-bad for Marvel in a row. Damn, I hope No Way Home is good.

Guys, what did you think about Eternals? Leave your answers in the comments below.