Chloé Zhao’s style gets Mar­velized in the first trail­er for Eternals

The new film from Chloé Zhao will be released into a world dras­ti­cal­ly dif­fer­ent from the one in which it was pro­duced. When she began work­ing on Eter­nals in the pre-pan­dem­ic world, Zhao was an up-and-com­ing indie tal­ent with a cou­ple low-pro­file suc­cess­es to her name; now, she’s at the top of Amer­i­can cinema’s heap in the wake of Nomad­land, with a pair of Oscar stat­uettes and and whole lot of indus­try buzz attached to her name.

With the debut of the first trail­er for Eter­nals this morn­ing, the biggest ques­tion is whether her sui gener­is style can be trans­lat­ed to a big­ger-bud­get stu­dio mod­el with a min­i­mum of cre­ative com­pro­mise. The footage on dis­play here doesn’t quite pro­vide an answer, one way or the other.

The exten­sive out­door shoot­ing in the trail­er recalls Zhao’s ear­li­er work, in thrall of the might and majesty of the nat­ur­al world, much to the aston­ish­ment of Mar­vel head Kevin Feige. The oblig­a­tory Mal­ick shot of a hand gen­tly graz­ing waves of grass con­firms that she’s still in the driver’s seat, regard­less of new cor­po­rate imper­a­tives placed upon her process.

That said, the over­all look of the trail­er is unmis­tak­ably Mar­vel. The de-sat­u­rat­ed, smeary col­or, peo­ple-stand­ing-in-a-line scene block­ing, and the brief snip­pet of Whe­do­nesque ban­ter at the tail end all evoke the assem­bly-line mod­el of pro­duc­tion we’ve come to know (and, for many, dread) over the past decade.

Most of the sus­pense sur­round­ing the film now con­cerns its plot, left for the most part ambigu­ous by the dia­logue-light trail­er. We know that The Eter­nals are a group of eons-old super-beings who help keep peace through the cos­mos on a uni­ver­sal scale (their ranks includ­ing Gem­ma Chan, Angeli­na Jolie, Kumail Nan­jiani, Bri­an Tyree Hen­ry, and Bar­ry Keoghan, among oth­ers), but beyond that, it’s anyone’s guess.

Eter­nals will come to cin­e­mas on 5 Novem­ber, 2021.