Who, Exactly, Do We Blame For Eternals?
The Latest MCU Film Is A Guileless Mess Of Writing And Rhetorical Inanity. How Did This Happen?
Tristan Young @talltristan
MAJOR SPOILERS FOR ETERNALS COMING AT YA
In 2014 Marvel premiered Guardians Of The Galaxy to the mostly unsuspecting masses. After the catalyzing momentum of multiple big-ticket films had culminated in the first Avengers, the MCU was ready to expand into more obscure characters. Many uninitiated film goers, especially those whose job it was to predict the pop cultural efficacy of the Marvel films were concerned maybe they had gone with something a little too niche this time. No one had really heard of the Guardians; most of us were largely ignorant of where they fit into the diaspora of Marvel characters in the cinematic universe, now that apparently they’re was such a thing. Such fears proved unwarranted however as GOTG was a smash hit. Its opulent color pallet, spectacle of excitement and vivid chemistry between its endearingly dysfunctional characters catapulted it near the top of the MCU favourites list where it has stubbornly remained. People said it was this generation’s Star Wars, not yet cognizant that that’s really a more accurate descriptor of the entire MCU, with an ever-expanding gestalt that would eventually become too large to quality control.
Nevertheless it had people and, crucially, Marvel convinced that there were no limitations to the characters they could exhume from the murky opaqueness of their comic back catalogue and be promoted to the big leagues. We got Ant Man, Black Panther, Shang Chi- none of them particularly well known outside of their initial mediums- and all of them became fairly well received house hold names within the much larger demographic of cinema. It became less of a question of what would Marvel adapt next, and more of what wouldn’t they. If this sounds slightly cynical and particularly hubristic, then you know the flying too close to the sun metaphor that Marvel’s newest film just couldn’t resist shoving down our throats in the bluntest way possible is on the tip of my tongue right now. Since Eternals couldn’t steer clear of this lowest hanging of rhetorical fruit in its own story, I’ll try to instead. Rather I’ll simply say Eternals is very bad.
25 films or so into the increasingly bloated and turgid MCU we finally have a film that does not insert itself with even a modicum of grace into not so much its narrative continuity, but its stylistic take on characters and aesthetics. You could actually call that a truly impressive streak, but Eternals has ended it. It’s ironic as the shunting of an unwieldy and grandiose narrative into the Marvel grinder highlights the dichotomous incompatibly of the two formats, rather than achieving anything synergistic. Say what you what will about the prefabrication and narrowing aperture of artistic licences that throttles the MCU films down a claustrophobic pathway of tonality and pacing, they have some pizazz to them at least. Eternals however, is clunky, ineffectual, and desaturated, not just in color but personality. It’s dull, but also hostilely aggravating in its thematic choices on an interpretational level, and even more so on an explicitly schematic level. The building blocks of this movie are decaying, too broken to fit together, and devoid of any organizational blueprint to make a narrative that is cogent, coherent or cognizant of what it wants to say. If anything at all.
A lot happens in Eternals, but much of the film’s fluidity is annexed by a weirdly bureaucratic and byzantine hierarchy of god like beings that the film must keep you apprised to. The short version is omnipotent beings called Celestials are responsible for guiding the universe down its evolutionary pathways- everything from macroscopic events like the formation of suns to more granular occurrences such as the development of a single sentient civilization like humanity. To curate the later, the Celestials created beings called The Eternals, who are god like also, but less so and not as big looking (to put it glibly). The Eternals are tasked with canvasing planets with incubating civilizations- say humanity some 7000 years ago- and guiding them through the varying epochs from their own developmental beginnings. They are also tasked with protecting humanity from monstrous creatures called the Deviants, whose only instinct is to indulge their ravenous thirst for bloodshed and carnage. The Eternals, all of whom have varying powers ranging from flight to super speed to magic weapons to transubstantiation spend their endless lives on earth learning about its people, helping them grow, and trying to operate as a mostly functional super family. It goes well for a while.
After a few thousands years, The Eternals have cleared the earth of Deviants and they find themselves at something of an existential impasse as to what to do next. Unsure of why they cannot return to their home planet now that the job is ostensibly done and with tensions and conflicts flaring up over what their relationship with and also ethical responsibly to the humans is to be moving forward, The Eternals opt to disband and live varying lives of isolated normalcy as best they can incognito. It’s only in the present when a new threat that shines an interrogative light on the true nature of their mission do they reconvene. Upon doing so our heroes must once and for all decide if their loyalties lay with the mission or with the planet; and more importantly with each other.
There’s an alternate universe where Eternals is an excellent film. One where thematic questions of autonomy, ecology, colonialism, and most importantly identity are properly weighted. A film whose many explosive action sequences involve villains of visual distinction and acuity. There’s a version of this film where the characters, some of which are excellently portrayed (Lauren Ridloff as Makkari, Barry Keoghan as Druig and Brian Tyree Henry as Phastos are all excellent in their own right) can generate a sufficient level of chemistry in their myriad interactions. Eternals has none of this; instead we have easily the worst written film in the MCU catalogue. The dialogue is unbelievably stiff with lines so agonizingly clichéd and played out that even in a 90s made for TV movie they would have been trite.
This may sound dramatic, but one must extract theatricality somewhere if a movie like this refuses to operate with little more than an anaemic pulse when it comes to delivery in its narrative and character arcs. Towards the end of the film I had begun cataloguing as best I could an assortment of some of the more offending lines to share with you. Midway through the film, warrior monk like character Gilgamesh (Ma Dong-seok) intones, “If you love something, you must protect it”. Sure. As characters Ajak (Salma Hayek) and Ikaris (Richard Madden) debate the merits of our wayward planet in the face of terrestrial doom she extols, “I’ve seen these humans laugh, and love”. We are descending into the hinterlands of mid 2000s Julia Roberts rom coms with writing like this. When Ikaris declares his affection for fellow Eternal Sersi (Gemma Chan) he spews, in the most antiseptic manner you can imagine, “I love you, I’m yours”. This is extra offensive as Madden is a Game Of Thrones alumni which is a show that used that same line already but at least deployed the requisite poetic symmetry with the follow up line, “and your mine”, so as to not make it unbearably cringe. This is followed up by a blasé sex scene which I’m told is a big deal as that has never happened in the MCU before but wasn’t that the whole point of the Thor/Hulk fight in Ragnarok on a sub-textual level? I think it was.
Anyways all of these phrases, and more like them, are actually in this movie. It astonishes me that a group of writers working on a draft committed themselves to these prodigiously lame lines and thought they had nailed it. Likewise is the idea that a producer didn’t skim over a draft of the script and summarily fire them all. Most of the actors in this film are quite talented, and I’m genuinely empathetic that they were contractually obligated to spout out such drivel. Remember the scenes in Avengers in which our heroes are simmering with resentment and tension through the act of simply conversing in a room together? Remember how taught and punchy it all was? The exchanges in this film are anathematized from such charisma save for the occasional one liner such as, “Druig sucks” (the timing of the line makes it better than it seems). Did an AI write this movie? Specifically a broken or malignant one?
The lazy writing permeates and infects the general story of Eternals to the point were you could fit a Celestial through its plot holes. One needn’t necessarily hold comic book films like these to the highest standards of continuity, but could the writers at least skim their work for massive incongruities before committing it to film? Much was made in the pre release hype of the film as to why exactly didn’t the Eternals ever assist humanity with the many threats it faced, specifically Thanos? Good question! The answer is something along the lines that their Celestial handler, Areshim, had instructed them to never interfere unless the threat involved those pesky Deviants. However, in one of the most ungraceful exposition dumps I’ve seen in a film in some time we learn the sinister ulterior machinations of Areshim. His goal was to allow humanity to prosper long enough to reach a request population that would supply a sufficient amount of energy to birth a new Celestial into the universe (this will break the planet in half so it’s bad). If this were the Eternals’ covert objective all along, then Thanos deleting half of the universe would have specially and severely hindered such an objective. By the film’s own internal logic, Arishem would have specifically wanted the Eternals to intervene on Thanos’ universal genocide. For all the haranguing around this question no one has really brought up the query of what exactly could they do that our other Marvel heroes couldn’t? None of them seem more impressive than say Thor or Captain Marvel. The Eternals heavy hitter Ikaris can fly and shoot lasers; so can Iron Man, and Iron Man appears better at it so…
In that same unwieldy exposition dump, we learn that Arishem has conducted and overseen this cycle of Celestial birth and planetary destruction for millions of years. It’s also revealed he created the Deviants, however they evolved beyond their purpose of culling apex predators and began attacking sentient life, hence Arishem creating a countervailing force in the Eternals to mitigate such things. The point is if he is well aware of the omnivorous tendencies of the Deviants, and he has gone through this cycle multiple times before, why bother sending the Deviants to earth in the first place, which thusly requires the insertion of the Eternals. Why not just skip it all? Its suggested that Arishem still needed to find a way to clear out the dinosaurs to make way for humans, but our species are separated by 65 million years of evolution. We weren’t going to bump into each other.
It’s in this regard that the film is oddly anti science in a number of respects. Going several steps further than the enthusiastic take on the secret history of all things kind of narrative, Eternals goes out of its way to systematically nullify all understood aspects of biological and cosmic evolution, suggesting a cold and inert universe were it not for their continuing interventions. Stars do not form through the natural processes of gravity, pressure and heat; the celestials made them. Planets are not habitable due to a confluence of serendipitous factors ensuring life can flourish but rather seeded by god like beings. Humanity’s accomplishments ranging from the plough to the steam engine are not the results of ingenuity or trial and error, but rather covertly gifted to us by our super powered benefactors. This is all kind of insulting and grates with an ambient pretention behind such assertions. Swap out the scary and cool looking Arishem The Judge for a more colloquial Christian god and the film suddenly seems steeped in rigid and anachronistic dogma. The story explicitly shows how an inchoate human civilization mistook the Eternals for gods which became the basis for much ancient folklore, but Eternals explicitly argues that these were not the mischaracterizations of neophyte humans- rather this truly is the way the world and the universe works.
The only avenue in which evolution is observed through a truly naturalistic lens is via the Deviant characters, and I use the term ‘characters’ in the loosest sense of the term. A film is always setting itself up for an uphill battle when it envisions its baddies as bland CGI blobs that have little more ambition beyond throwing and taking punches. These creatures’ design and rendering are matched only by their overall utility in the story, which is to say is severely lacking. It seemed obvious that there would have to be a villain with more of an actual agenda and personality beyond the rabid mindlessness of the Deviants, and indeed one of the film’s better choices was the late stage reveal of Ikaris being a real jerk. But with him supplanting the Deviants as the film’s big bad, Eternals reveals it has absolutely no use for these creatures. No point to make about them, no metaphor for ecological balance or the perils of weaponizing a living thing.
This is extra weird and a drastically obvious missed opportunity considering how things play out. As one of the Deviants absorbs the powers of the Eternals it kills and rapidly evolves because *reasons*, it gains the ability to speak, and actually shares its thoughts. There is an intriguing moment of the creature biliously and correctly asserting that the Eternals are the true monsters, and then the film does nothing at all with this emergent story thread. No insight into what the Deviants truly are, what there place in the universe could be if they were not relegated to the position of monstrous derision. No rumination on if they, along with the Eternals, were being perpetually exploited and therefore maybe it was time move past this intrinsic antagonism or literally manufactured grievances. Nope, he’s still just an evil bad guy that does evil things until Thena (Angelina Jolie) cuts him up. Remember the late stage reveal of The Skrulls being deeply empathetic and nuanced individuals in Captain Marvel and how much more substance it gave the film? Now imagine the opposite.
These missed opportunities extend into the pathology of the Eternals themselves. Faced with the existential crises of learning they are synthetic beings constructed for a purpose far more unscrupulous than they had been led to believe, they don’t seem all that shaken by the revelation. They are highly perturbed that their ostensible heroism is much more dubious than they had thought, but beyond that there is little reflection on what the nature of their very being means to them. Are their feelings artificial? Can they even trust that they truly have emotions? Does their ability to love and care for each other and humans imply they have grown beyond their mandated programing and therefore their incubating perception of conscience as it conflicts with the mission must be considered? How about their evolving ontological view of the world now that they understand humans may have more of a right to exist than they do? Does that change anything? Not really, they are all tied up in infantile notions of heroism and duty, stuff that seems awfully remedial considering they just found out they are replicants.
Perhaps it’s fitting that they persist in their continuous state of arrested development. It’s at least synchronous with their exasperating insistence on repeatedly learning the wrong lessons about humanity and morality. The extent to which they miss the mark on obvious exercises in ethics and accountability is borderline shocking. When Phastos, whose power is abstractly rendered through inventing things and then gifting them to earth, observes the heart breaking nuclear destruction of Hiroshima he is understandably distraught. As he breaks down into tears amidst the radioactive ashes the obvious observation is that by surreptitiously guiding humans down industrial and technological pathways of his design he bares at least some responsibility for the horrors of the atomic age. Except that’s not the conclusion he draws; rather he snarls that humans aren’t worth saving, suggesting that such genocide is wholly our fault and has nothing to do with his benign tampering. This is so reflexively un-self aware that it almost becomes parody. You would have to twist yourself into gymnastic rhetorical knots to conclude this had nothing to do with him and yet that’s his default analysis. Elsewhere when the aforementioned Deviant grows the ability to communicate and expresses his disdain for the marauding oppression of the Eternals, Sersi remarks something along the lines of, “it has a conscience now, that makes it even more dangerous”. This is a fucked up thing to say! A movie should not be implying having a conscience is a bad thing! Correctly asserting that this Deviant was no longer a mindless murder lizard was the film’s opportunity to achieve a deeper understanding, to form actual character arcs.
For characters that wish to pride themselves for their empathy of all things living, they seem oddly immunized from giving a shit when given the opportunity to do so. This is no more endemic than then with the multiple interactions with Eternal Kingo’s (Kumail Nanijani) driver/butler/friend. They are consistently dicks to him. They smash his cameras, berate his assistance, and are just generally dismissive to him. How does he respond near the film’s climax? By saying it was an honour to travel along side them. Imagine if he said they were a dysfunctional band of prima donnas and told them to fuck off; that could have been a reflective moment that galvanized them to actually do better by the people they have alleged to care about for millenniums, but instead they just continue to assume their altruism in the eyes of humanity.
Who’s to blame for all of this? Rumours swirled around in the earliest days of pre production that director Chloé Zhao’s pitch for the film to Marvel Studios head Kevin Feige was the best he’d ever seen. Lately however the discourse around Marvel films is how little creative control the studio gives its directors, opting instead for obsequiousness to its algorithmic like tonal consistency across them all. Why bother with high profile directors if they can’t lend their artistic licence to the project? Much has been made of Zhao’s mark on the film in terms of cinematography. Her Oscar winning film Nomadland indeed is a mournful yet bucolic rendering of Middle America in a state of accelerated decay. Many reviews of Eternals argue she has translated her considerable talents of photographing the environment and using naturalistic lighting to convey a sense of ecological grandeur to the film, but I’m not convinced. Many of the shots are exterior, and they are wide. There isn’t much to comment on beyond that. Sure Zhao utilizes the immutable and pearlescent beauty of natural sunlight to hue the peripheries of characters with an angelic aura, but that is hardly a visual calling card specific to her work. Thousands of movies across generations have utilized similar visual hagiography so I fail to see the big deal behind her deploying it in fairly obvious ways here.
Nomadland, with its hybrid documentary style format had ad hoc and genuinely unpredictable interactions between its characters. Here in Eternals, the characters interact with the dynamism of creatures carved from marble, which again may be unintentionally perfect considering their luxuriated and rarefied status as demi gods. There’s certainly nothing human about how these characters mix it up, which considering they are supposed to have lived among us for 7000 years, is about as scathing an indictment I can think of. I’m just not sure whom that indictment should be levelled against. Zhao, Feige, an anonymous committee of producers that dissolved the edges where personality manifests into something more routinely palatable? It’s hard to say, but it also doesn’t really matter. With Eternals, Marvel has entered a new phase; but it’s not the numerical suffixes it uses to indicate the next realm of expansion and conceptualism. The MCU has entered the phase where it’s less of the boldest and most audacious cinematic project ever; rather it’s really just a TV series. Eternals is just an episode. A bad one yes, but nothing more. Watch it to stay up to date if you must, skip it on subsequent runs when you buy the inevitable box set. This may be a cynical assessment of things but how do they expect us to respond when a character named Ikaris literally flies into the sun?