'Eternals' Disney+ Review: Stream It or Skip It?

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Eternals

Fresh on Disney+, Eternals brings some NAMES to the Marvel Cinematic Universe: Angelina Jolie. Salma Hayek. And perhaps most compellingly, director Chloe Zhao, who just won an Oscar for Nomadland, and wowed us before that with an even teensier drama, The Rider. Zhao’s transition from art films to assimilation into a goliath blockbuster franchise puts her under broad scrutiny (and surely gives her quite the payday), but also is a gamble for Marvel, which rarely tinkers with its lucrative formula (and surely can afford to ante up). Based on one of the two-thirds nutty creations of comics king Jack Kirby (you should see the full-on nutty stuff!), Eternals was a modest box office draw (ASTERISK: during a pandemic), which tells us doodledy-squat about whether it’s a creative success or stumble; good thing we’re here to mull over such things for you, right? Right.

ETERNALS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: SCROLLING TEXT: There’s too much of it. Great way to start a movie! Be thankful I’m here to condense it: Once upon a time, there were some outer space godlike beings with a proper-noun title – Kloggdraktks or something – OK, they’re just Celestials, yawn – who employed some immortal outer space superheroes called Eternals to protect non-outer space Earthlings from outer space monsters dubbed Deviants. MESOPOTAMIA, 5000 B.C.: The Eternals vanquish some Deviants and stand dashingly and majestically in symmetric formation for the first of too many times in this movie. They do like to pose. They pose, therefore they are; they are, therefore they pose.

While the Eternals stand in a symmetrical wedge shape, let’s take roll. Ajak (Hayak) leads the group, and is their official go-between with the Celestials. Some Eternals are powerful badasses, like Sersi (Gemma Chan), who can turn things into different things (Wikipedia calls it a “psionic ability to rearrange the molecular structure of objects”); Ikaris (Richard Madden), who, with his destructive eye beams and ability to fly, is basically Superman; or Thena, who’s just Angelina Jolie playing herself, a stunning warrior goddess. Others kinda got dicked when they were handing out powers, e.g., Gilgamesh (Ma Dong-seok), a basic strongman with glowing ethereal outer space fist-gloves; Phastos (Brian Tyree Henry), a science-guy inventor of technology; or Kingo (Kumail Nanjiani), who shoots laser zaps from his fingers. Three more Eternals (yes, three, gasp, pant) have powers of a more nebulous, potentially dangerous sort: Sprite (Lia McHugh) can create illusions, Makkari (Lauren Ridloff) can run very fast like the Flash and Druig (Barry Keoghan) can mass-control minds.

Now we’re tasked with keeping track of all these characters within multiple settings as the movie jumps from one far-flung locale to another, and from past to present to far-past to near-present like a heavily Skittled first grader. Hopefully we’ll give half a crap! In the present day, they’re scattered hither and yon, immortal folk trying to live normal human mortal lives. Sersi is sort of the main character, living in London, working as a history prof, creating Kamala/Doug Emhoff vibes with her boyfriend Dane Whitman (Kit Harington), who we’ll soon learn has replaced her previous beau, Ikaris, which means in an an alt-reality, House Stark was rendered quite asunder. Kingo is a Bollywood star making superhero musicals, Phastos has settled into family life with his husband and son, Thena struggles with an unstable outer space mental health condition under Gilgamesh’s care, and of course Ajak lives in solitude in South Dakota, because a Chloe Zhao movie without quiet scenes in South Dakota is not a Chloe Zhao movie at all.

Very long story made short: The Eternals broke up and now have to get the band back together, when “global earthquakes” and the reemergence of the Deviants, once thought vanquished, signal a disturbance of cosmic proportions. What follows is a process of apocalypse so convoluted, if every Bond villain formed one massive conglomerate mind in a single body, its jaw would fall slack with awe and wonder. Who, you might ask, will pose heroically in wedge formation as dramatic music swells, and save the world? NO SPOILERS.

ETERNALS, Gemma Chan — Photo: ©Walt Disney Co./Courtesy Everett Collection

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Eternals is the Villeneuve’s Dune of the MCU: Ambitious, sprawling, visually inspired, mega-talented cast and director, stiff as a board. The story has hints of Watchmen, the book and movie, less so the HBO series; it also centers on a Guardians of the Galaxy-type conglomerate of misfits, but instead of being funny and full of heart, the Eternals are squashed flat by quasi-Shakespearean gravitas.

Performance Worth Watching: Being part of an ensemble that’s mostly just poker-facing its way through stilted exposition is fairly thankless work. But I will say that Gemma Chan – so excellent in Crazy Rich Asians – carries enough screen presence to deserve a Sersi solo series on Disney+.

Memorable Dialogue: Phastos punctuates the movie’s climactic finale with this humdinger: “I always wondered how we survived the destruction of other planets we were on!”

Sex and Skin: In the first-ever MCU sex scene, Sersi and Ikaris briefly shtoink in a desert canyon – in chaste, romantic PG-13 style.

Our Take: Eternals proves that no conflict between selfless heroes and evil forces bent on Earth’s destruction, between free will and the irrepressible destinies of nature, can be solved without a whole lotta punching and stabbing. There’s more to it than rudimentary violence, of course, since the movie takes a small eternity to work through each Eternal’s opportunity to contribute to the collective art of world-saving, but what I remember most is all the punching and the stabbing. I felt bad for the antagonists, who went through so much trouble, millennia of preparing and scheming, sending the monsters and waiting for them to evolve into sentience, just for a good chunk of the conflict to be resolved with the usual punching and stabbing. I guess they’re the ones who sent the usual ugly, gnashing monsters, which absolutely deserve to be punched and stabbed.

At least the Eternals are well-versed in teamwork, so their story doesn’t repeat a lot of the Avengers fodder; they’re evolved well beyond the art of assembling, so all the posing in formation is second nature to them. It frees them to wrestle with grandiose philosophical fodder – what it means to be human, life-and-death yin-yang stuff, etc. – in a most stultifying and dull manner. Zhao introduces piles of big ideas, crafts an excuse to deploy battle sequences and flashy, grandiose camera maneuvers, then mires everything in exposition and plot developments parched for a drop of dramatic consequence. The characters, made of the finest artisanal cardboard, are mostly empty vessels reciting blither-blather dialogue, and find themselves in the exquisitely unenviable position of looking great but having not a damn thing interesting to say. Once in a while, the script pops with Marvel-style bits of quippy comedy, but none of it lands impactfully.

It’s admirable to see Zhao try to stretch the boundaries of what an MCU film can be, especially with such a broadly diverse cast. But Eternals has more in common with a dour DC exercise or clunky, forgettable epics like Jupiter Ascending or John Carter. Jack Kirby was an innovator with boundless imagination, and one can sense Zhao trying to do justice to his creations (AND please Marvel fans AND do something outside the contextual norm, which adds up to too much). But the final product leaves one thinking that they’re not at all congruous to live-action movie adaptations. You could never take Kirby’s work seriously, but I’ll be damned if the movie doesn’t demand just the opposite. More crucially, it’s simply not much fun.

Our Call: SKIP IT. In the MCU, even the not-great movies are reasonably entertaining, and worth a watch. Eternals is the rare franchise entry that’s a major misfire.