Eternals. (12A.)
Directed by Chloé Zhao
Starring Gemma Chan, Richard Madden, Angelina Jolie, Kumail Nanjiani, Kit Harrington, Patrick Keoghan and Salma Hayek. In cinemas. 157 mins.
In this year of getting back into the swing of things, cinema has been one sector making a particularly faltering return to action. (Probably the conclusion to draw from this is that 2020 would've been a lousy year for movies even without Covid.) The pandemic forced the Marvel Cinematic Sprawl into taking a two-year break. This really should've worked in its favour but absence just seemed to make the new films feel that bit more samey. Eternals is yet another of their costumed ensemble pieces much like all the others, yet actually quite different. This one may actually have ambition.
For a start, these Eternals are a band apart. Thanos gets a couple of mentions, but there is no intermingling with the rest of the Marvel hoi polloi. The introductory scrawl reads like a comic book of Genesis, telling how the creator of all things – a dead ringer for the Iron Giant – begat the Celestials then begat the Deviants (the baddies) before begating the Eternals, everlasting humanoid superbeings who have spent the last seven thousand years overseeing the evolution of humanity. In effect, they are the monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey in X-Men form. The narrative kicks off in present-day London but, during its two and half hour plus running time, jumps around all over the course of history stopping off at Babylonia and Mesopotamia. There is the usual Marvel humour and punch ups, but set within a film of awe-inspiring scope.
Eternals is surely unique in being a superhero film from a director who has just won the Oscar: it was just over six months ago that Zhao was wearing her Sacheen Littlefeather tribute outfit at the Academy Awards to pick up her Best Director award for Nomadland. Almost from the very beginning, Marvel has made a point of picking directors who have a bit of indie credibility or are known for their TV work. They are there to add a little bit of individuality to the process, working with the actors or on the script. Mostly though the giant Marvel machine makes the movie: the credits may announce that this is A Chloé Zhao Film but the thousands upon thousands of names in the credits, all the wretched scriveners of CGI, suggest otherwise.
Eternals, however, does show signs of her having had some impact on the process. I'm not saying it is an arthouse comic book movie, but the pacing is a little bit slower than the norm and the script has a touch more moral ambiguity. Above all, it is incredibly beautiful to look at. The credits attest to the fact that thousands of keyboard hours went into its creation, but the CGI is rarely noticeable. Much of the film looks like it was shot on location with real people doing real things in real places. Marvel has been at the cutting edge of this kind of photorealistic special effects since the falling out of the airplane sequence at the end of Iron Man 3, but this is a step up from anything they've done before. At times these spaceships and monsters and superheroes appear to have wandered off and found themselves in a Terence Malick movie.
Whether all this helps the movie is debatable. Do audiences want a slower, more thoughtful comic book movie? Plus, this approach does just emphasise the silliness of the whole enterprise. For all it innovation these Eternals still behave very much like all the other superhero ensembles with much the same set of super abilities: running fast, laser beams eyes, flying etc. They are supposed to be godlike beings, made to last for all time, yet they bicker with each other, fall in and out of love and can be ridiculously petty. It's endearing when the Avengers do it, but unbecoming in Eternal beings.
This is the 26th instalment in the big screen Marvel Cinematic Sprawl and, for me, the fact that they have made a genuinely divisive film, a film that people who normally like their films might not like, feels like a tremendous step forward.
Directed by Chloé Zhao
Starring Gemma Chan, Richard Madden, Angelina Jolie, Kumail Nanjiani, Kit Harrington, Patrick Keoghan and Salma Hayek. In cinemas. 157 mins.
In this year of getting back into the swing of things, cinema has been one sector making a particularly faltering return to action. (Probably the conclusion to draw from this is that 2020 would've been a lousy year for movies even without Covid.) The pandemic forced the Marvel Cinematic Sprawl into taking a two-year break. This really should've worked in its favour but absence just seemed to make the new films feel that bit more samey. Eternals is yet another of their costumed ensemble pieces much like all the others, yet actually quite different. This one may actually have ambition.
For a start, these Eternals are a band apart. Thanos gets a couple of mentions, but there is no intermingling with the rest of the Marvel hoi polloi. The introductory scrawl reads like a comic book of Genesis, telling how the creator of all things – a dead ringer for the Iron Giant – begat the Celestials then begat the Deviants (the baddies) before begating the Eternals, everlasting humanoid superbeings who have spent the last seven thousand years overseeing the evolution of humanity. In effect, they are the monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey in X-Men form. The narrative kicks off in present-day London but, during its two and half hour plus running time, jumps around all over the course of history stopping off at Babylonia and Mesopotamia. There is the usual Marvel humour and punch ups, but set within a film of awe-inspiring scope.
Eternals is surely unique in being a superhero film from a director who has just won the Oscar: it was just over six months ago that Zhao was wearing her Sacheen Littlefeather tribute outfit at the Academy Awards to pick up her Best Director award for Nomadland. Almost from the very beginning, Marvel has made a point of picking directors who have a bit of indie credibility or are known for their TV work. They are there to add a little bit of individuality to the process, working with the actors or on the script. Mostly though the giant Marvel machine makes the movie: the credits may announce that this is A Chloé Zhao Film but the thousands upon thousands of names in the credits, all the wretched scriveners of CGI, suggest otherwise.
Eternals, however, does show signs of her having had some impact on the process. I'm not saying it is an arthouse comic book movie, but the pacing is a little bit slower than the norm and the script has a touch more moral ambiguity. Above all, it is incredibly beautiful to look at. The credits attest to the fact that thousands of keyboard hours went into its creation, but the CGI is rarely noticeable. Much of the film looks like it was shot on location with real people doing real things in real places. Marvel has been at the cutting edge of this kind of photorealistic special effects since the falling out of the airplane sequence at the end of Iron Man 3, but this is a step up from anything they've done before. At times these spaceships and monsters and superheroes appear to have wandered off and found themselves in a Terence Malick movie.
Whether all this helps the movie is debatable. Do audiences want a slower, more thoughtful comic book movie? Plus, this approach does just emphasise the silliness of the whole enterprise. For all it innovation these Eternals still behave very much like all the other superhero ensembles with much the same set of super abilities: running fast, laser beams eyes, flying etc. They are supposed to be godlike beings, made to last for all time, yet they bicker with each other, fall in and out of love and can be ridiculously petty. It's endearing when the Avengers do it, but unbecoming in Eternal beings.
This is the 26th instalment in the big screen Marvel Cinematic Sprawl and, for me, the fact that they have made a genuinely divisive film, a film that people who normally like their films might not like, feels like a tremendous step forward.
