‘Eternals’ Review: Chloé Zhao’s Marvel Entry Is Ambitious, But A Convoluted Cosmic Misfire

The broad and common critique of Marvel movies, generally, is that they are often anonymously made, cookie-cutter in shape, and—if created by an indie auteur—set up in a way that generally strips that filmmaker of their voice or any discerning identity. In some regards, Chloé Zhao’s “Eternals” seems engineered as an exact rejoinder to this criticism. If Marvel is generally boxing in their filmmakers (so some claim anyhow), then they’ve allowed Zhao, an Oscar winner for this year’s “Nomadland,” to do whatever she wants. While the freedom to create sounds ideal on paper, the actual result is an overlong (2 hours 45 minutes) movie that is one of Marvel’s dullest efforts in years—a convoluted film that is enervating and uninvolving. In short, be careful what you wish for, “Eternals” is creative freedom backfiring.

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But on paper, Zhao is doing all the right things and giving (some) audiences what they’ve wanted for years: room to breathe and meditate on character, provide ample room for emotion, and even include a sex scene (that is sadly, totally sexless). No matter the good intentions, the screenplay, credited to Chloé Zhao and Chloé Zhao & Patrick Burleigh and Ryan Firpo & Kaz Firpo (yes, Zhao, twice) is a chore and a convoluted one at that.

“Eternals” is a chore to explain too, and even comes with an opening “Star Wars”-like crawl—it is by far the Marvel movie with the most mumbo jumbo backstory explaining the setup of things. The shortest possible version of that is this: Eternals are immortal aliens created by cosmic building beings called Celestials. Celestials build planets—Deviants, the CGI monsters, and bad guys of the movie—try and destroy civilization, and the Eternals are kind of like the space police that make sure Deviants don’t kill everyone.

This group of Eternals, a cadre of fighters and thinkers, has been on Earth since the dawn of time, protecting humanity, but told they cannot intervene in any matters aside from the ones that involve Deviants (there’s no interfering in World Wars or the threat of Thanos). Set over two timelines—the past, seeing the Eternals over many different eras, empires, and civilizations—and present day, where the Eternals have long since broken up as a family unit.

After a long, fight-‘em-up prologue in the past—seemingly inserted just to show some early action of the entire team in their glory—“Eternals” opens in the modern-day. Sersi (Gemma Chan from “Crazy Rich Asians”) is dating regular human, Natural History Museum historian Dane Whitman (Kit Harrington of “Game Of Thrones”), and while he suspects she’s “special,” doesn’t know the full extent of her powers. Sprite (Lia McHugh), an Eternal who has the appearance of a child, is constantly hanging around Sersi for some reason, but before anything can really be explained, the Deviant creatures—thought to be extinct for centuries and the reason the Eternals thought they no longer needed to exist as a team—have turned up suddenly (this means Sersi’s former flame, Ikaris, played by Richard Madden, precipitously returns too).

Their inexplicable return sets off a chain reaction of plot that turns “Eternals” into a sort of long and winding cosmic murder mystery: how did the Deviants come back to life? Surely Ajak (Salma Hayek), the wise and spiritual leader of the Eternals will know the answer. In short, it’s time to get the Eternals band back together again, but the murder of one of their ten members points to a larger conspiracy afoot. Complicating matters, most of the Eternals are scattered to the winds, doing their own thing, many no longer interested in fulfilling their role of celestial enforcer (the most entertaining of these stories is Kumail Nanjiani as Kingo, an Eternal now posing as a Bollywood filmmaker and star).

This story isn’t all that interesting, but at least it’s forward-moving with a clear and simple narrative goal in mind: find out who killed [redacted Eternal] and find out how this is all connected to the return of Deviants (the answer is an incomprehensible mess of wtf cosmic gibberish that only confuses and deflates the film further, think those overly elaborate scenes in “The Matrix: Reloaded” when the Architect grinds the movie to a halt with soul-draining exposition). But the already wonky “Eternals” pacing and plot is further mired by a structure that keeps jumping back in time, essentially demonstrating how the group broke up. The short answer is a crisis of conscience, led by Druig (Barry Keoghan). What good are these powers if they can’t be used to stop civilization and humanity from destroying itself some of them ask? With Deviants seemingly defeated, and the Eternals serving no purpose on Earth, without structure or the permission to help better humanity, the group dissolves.

And while this central ethical question is the most interesting moral meat of the movie—losing faith in humanity— the way it gets there is long, circuitous, and fatiguing. By the time this backstory is all revealed (the mid-way point) and the present-day plot can finally move forward unencumbered, you just don’t really care and there’s still an hour-plus of movie to go.

While there are some twists and surprises in the way of antagonists, none of them engaging enough to wake the film to life, and some of the true nature of Celestials, the central CGI-Deviant monster (even the super Deviant one that talks), is an extremely tiresome and uninteresting villain. Furthermore, with ten Eternals to get to (Angelina Jolie, Brian Tyree Henry, and Don Lee comprising some of the other members), you never really get much reason to care about anyone other than Sersi, who is really the heart of the story and the one Eternal that really believes in humanity (Sprite and Madden’s Ikaris are the two other major characters).

While Zhao is a terrific filmmaker in her personal arthouse films (“Nomadland,” “The Rider”), not much of what makes those films so poetic and captivating is present here, aside from a similarly unhurried pace which does wonders in her own meditative films and is a kiss of death here. That’s maybe not entirely true. It’s pretty to look at too and has her trademark, low-lit, natural-light look is intact. And “Eternals” is admittedly ambitious and trying to do something different in the MCU. But neither of those aims are inherently good things, especially when the basics of a story never fully remotely come together (there’s a love story at its center which feels “new” for Marvel too, but it’s never affecting).

In some senses, Zhao bucks the Marvel formula, but goes so far off-piste, everything that’s enjoyable about Marvel—the breezy snap, crackle, and pop of escapist watchable entertainment—go out the window in favor of something far more muddled. In another sense, it’s not all that different, just not orchestrated very well with an ill-advised structure that mars the entire affair.

Zhao really takes her cues here from DC Comics—not fundamentally a bad thing—but it does explain maybe why “Eternals” never connects. In a very broad sense, Marvel stories are generally about ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances (a teenage kid gets spider-powers). DC stories tend to be about extraordinary beings (Superman, Wonder Woman) put into the ordinary setting of mankind, and are generally gods among men. One is not necessarily better than the other, but it’s certainly easier to relate to the human over the deity, whose biggest personal crises tend to be existential ones. “Eternals” certainly follows that mold, though it should be said, that’s maybe one of the patchy movie’s least worries (and to that end, one character is essentially just Superman, another just Flash). It’s a misfire any way you slice it and one of Marvel’s most curiously unalluring movies since the awkward, early growing pain days in Phase One and Two (“Iron Man II,” “Thor: The Dark World”).  [C-]