ETERNALS — Fruitcake Enterprises

Directing: B
Acting: B-
Writing: B-
Cinematography: B
Editing: B-
Special Effects: B+

Is Eternals any good? Reviews are decidedly mixed, with instant detractors calling it a misfire or a dud . . . I wouldn’t go that far. It’s not great either, but it’s better than that. I suppose one thing the movie has going for it is low expectations, because for me the movie thus exceeded them.

Bear in mind, this is an entirely new story in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, with a concept particularly vast in scope, downright Biblical—it begins with title cards that essentially reference the beginning of time, like an alternate version of Genesis. No need for me to explain it; it’s just a bunch of made-up jargon. Suffice it to say that these ten entities are the titular “Eternals,” immortal except apparently not as we discover in this story, tasked with helping humanity along in their grand plan of evolution.

Tasked by whom? Hell, I don’t remember the name of the being, nor do I know whether he’s supposed to be a god. One of the “celestials,” I think? Trust me on this one: if you go into Eternals with no working knowledge of the Marvel Comics source material, the backstory here is very complicated. I mean, the Eternals themselves are effectively gods, and they answer to what are effectively gods, and they apparently have more power than the superheroes who make up the Avengers who are also effectively (and a few of them are literally) gods. How does this hierarchy get decided, anyway?

The Avengers get one mention in this movie. Bizarrely, two DC comics superheroes—Superman and Batman—get more mentions, which I found confusing. And even though they clearly exist in the same universe, there is no interaction between Eternals and any of the standard Marvel superheroes. How would they reconcile that, anyway? Thor and Loki are gods, right? Eternals—spoiler alert!—are ultimately revealed not to be gods, but they might as well be. They hold sway over the literal destiny of the entire planet, and have been actively involved for thousands of years. We see several flashbacks to key points in Eternals history contextualized within ancient human history.

When “deviants” were mentioned in the trailer to Eternals, I thought I knew what they were talking about. There are also “deviants” in the Marvel series on Disney+, Loki. I was sure they must be one and the same—they’re all within the MCU, right? Well, apparently not. The “deviants” are these grotesque monster-creatures in Eternals, one of whom quickly evolves into a verbal humanoid as he absorbs the powers of the couple of Eternals he (it?) defeats. They exist exclusively as part of the backstory in just this movie, related to the birth and rebirth of “celestials,” the process of which leaves the fate of humanity in the balance. For most of Eternals, these are the villains the Eternals are battling.

Until their team fractures, and they begin battling each other, and that is when Eternals actually starts to get interesting. Until then, unfortunately, the previously exciting choice of Chloé Zhao as director proves fundamentally inconsequential. Nomadland, this is not. Zhao is the latest in a string of small movie directors who, after only one or two projects, gets thrust upon a gargantuan blockbuster project. At least with someone like Gareth Edwards, whose 2010 indie Monsters had a sense of scale and wonder well translated to Godzilla (2014), subpar as that movie was—in fact, Eternals is a better movie than Godzilla. That still doesn’t mean Zhao was the best choice, or that her talents are allowed to reach their full potential there.

There are moments within the first half hour or so of Eternals that feel almost like a bad omen, particularly with some of the actors’ delivery. These are ten great actors portraying the ten Eternals, and there’s no reason for any of their line readings to feel unrehearsed. This may be less the fault of the actors themselves than of the director and the editor.

Once the story gets going, though, so long as you can ignore the nitpicky details with which I started this review, Eternals becomes surprisingly entertaining—and it features a lot of well written humor, which lands well. This is especially the case with the storyline of Kingo, played by Kumail Nanjiani, who is re-introduced in the present day as a huge Bollywood star for over a century. (Kingo has a clever explanation for this which I won’t spoil.) There are much bigger movie stars in Eternals than Nanjiani, but his physical transformation into superhero buffness for the film granted him arguably the most shared press. An extra fun detail is veteran comic Indian actor Harish Patel, who gets a significant supporting role as Kingo’s longtime “valet.”

The other nine Eternals are played by the likes of Angelina Jolie; Salma Hayek (who plays the leader of the ten); Brian Tyree Henry; British Asian actor Gemma Chan; Richard Madden; South Korean actor Ma Dong-seok; The Walking Dead’s Lauren Ridloff; The Killing of a Sacred Deer’s Barry Keoghan (after roles like that, it’s impressive that guy manages not to be creepy here); and 15-year-old Lia McHugh, who plays an Eternal stuck for eternity as a teenager—something that gets a sort of clever fix by the end of this film, in the event of any sequels in which she would be noticeably older.

That list of actors does elicit the question: is Eternals the most broadly diverse Marvel movie made to date? Or even superhero movie, for that matter? One might want to mention Black Panther, except that has (completely appropriate) focus on Black characters as the majority of its cast, with a couple white people in principal supporting parts. The ten principals in Eternals represent people, or at least ancestry, from five of the six populated continents; I don’t believe any are from or have heritage from South America, but Salma Hayek is, of course, Mexican, so there is Latin representation. Of the ten principals, only four are unambiguously white, which is arguably still over-representative in a global context, but is certainly unusual in a U.S. context. If nothing else, it should help with the worldwide box office, particularly when it comes to actors actually from places like South Korea or India or Mexico.

This sort of both organic and careful curating of actors for the film can perhaps be at least party attributed to Zhao, in which case her involvement certainly made the movie better than it might otherwise have been. It just doesn’t have any identifying features that make the broad arc of the story feel like it couldn’t have been directed by anyone, who just happened to be competent. I want Zhao to be able to make movies that clearly have a singular touch. And at the end of the day, its many redeeming qualities notwithstanding, Eternals is just another, overlong, comic book movie. At least it’s engaging and entertaining, a fun time at the movies. I just wanted it to be more special than it is, that’s all.