Eter­nals

Maybe it’s the result of naiveté, or just a sur­feit of mis­placed opti­mism, but it has been sad to wit­ness the inces­sant pile-on that Chloé Zhao​’s Eter­nals has received pret­ty much from the sec­ond it was made pub­lic that she would be direct­ing this stu­dio behe­moth. Based on the morsels of pre-release mar­ket­ing and the oblique sound­bites that inter­view­ers could extract from the Oscar-win­ning film­mak­er while on the Nomad­land press tour, the film has been the sub­ject of an all-guns-blaz­ing online dunk­ing cam­paign from minute one.

As some­one who is, in the main, not a fan of the CG-pow­ered pyra­mid scheme that is the Mar­vel Cin­e­mat­ic Uni­verse, it may seem a lit­tle strange to have sud­den­ly crossed the floor to stand on the side of the defence. Yet it seems so puz­zling that this film in par­tic­u­lar would get so much shit sight unseen, as even if Zhao was only able to bring, at most, 50 per cent of her ethe­re­al ​“touch” to what would oth­er­wise be an over-oiled cor­po­rate prod­uct, then that is most assured­ly a rea­son to be cheer­ful, is it not?

When an ear­ly rash of tastemak­ers, fans and insid­ers (what­ev­er that means) were shown a sneak-peek of Eter­nals, their reac­tions sug­gest­ed that they had no real idea what to make of it. The typ­i­cal I‑saw-it-first hyper­bole was wreathed in doubt, maybe sug­gest­ing that they want­ed to cir­cle a bit to see what the next wave of view­ers would make of it before they pinned their colours to the MCU mast. Some saw this mut­ed response as affir­ma­tion of the anti-hype, but per­haps Zhao had done some­thing to, if not break the tem­plate, then re-shape it in her own image.

What she has deliv­ered is a ver­sion of the MCU that throws cau­tion into the wind, that embraces and artic­u­lates grand philo­soph­i­cal notions in a way that is nei­ther glib nor infan­tilised, and brings togeth­er an ensem­ble who have chem­istry beyond being able to trade over-writ­ten quips with one-anoth­er. There are rough edges, and scenes that are ter­ri­bly mis­judged – maybe close your eyes and block your ears when Bri­an Tyree Hen­ry crops up in the smoul­der­ing nuclear fall­out radius of the Hiroshi­ma bomb­ing. But the good far out­weighs the bad.

Nudg­ing aside some of these tri­fling mis­steps, Zhao has made a film which turns the boil­er­plate End Of The World sto­ry arc into some­thing that’s lugubri­ous and melan­choly. There’s a sat­is­fy­ing lack of tri­umphal­ism in this state­ly epic, dis­placed by a feel­ing of res­ig­na­tion and a sense that, when we do final­ly bring about our col­lec­tive demise, it’ll be sud­den and pain­less, like a light being switched off – we’ll nev­er know what happened.

The Eter­nals them­selves are a colour-cod­ed clique of age­less, god-like super­be­ings who are sent to earth to pro­tect the human race from a band of maraud­ing and high­ly sym­bol­ic dinosaur-like beast­ies called the Deviants. Their orders have been passed down by an almighty galac­tic being called Arishem, a Celes­tial, who has stat­ed that they should only destroy Deviants and not inter­vene in any of the oth­er vio­lent strug­gles that peo­ple may bring about by them­selves. It’s a sim­ple request that, we dis­cov­er, proves dif­fi­cult to fol­low. They are, in essence, humanity’s caretakers.

From the inti­ma­tions of the open­ing drag, which sup­plies the broad con­text of the Eter­nals’ appar­ent rai­son d’etre with a few por­ten­tous addi­tions, it’s clear that we are in the com­pa­ny of trag­ic fig­ures. It’s refresh­ing for one of these films to state, pri­or to any images appear­ing on the screen, that the super­heroes we’re about to spend time with are maybe not super, nor are they heroes, and that there’s some­thing much big­ger than them lurk­ing in the back­ground. A sense of inevitable futil­i­ty lingers across the film’s entire runtime.

Though theirs is a fair­ly egal­i­tar­i­an crew, there are dom­i­nant char­ac­ters in the mix. The first is Salma Hayek’s Ajak whose main pow­er is com­mu­ni­cat­ing with the Celes­tials and is more like a beloved sage than a fight­ing force. The sec­ond is Richard Madden’s Ikaris, who shares sim­i­lar spe­cial abil­i­ties to the X‑Men’s Cyclops, in that he fires lasers from his eyes and can fly – plac­ing him in the vaunt­ed posi­tion of the most phys­i­cal­ly pow­er­ful. Final­ly there’s Gem­ma Chan’s Ser­si, who is nudged for­ward as the film’s cen­tral char­ac­ter, or at least its moral nucle­us. She’s some­one who is clear­ly com­mit­ted to the Eter­nals’ cause, but hasn’t quite worked out what her strange abil­i­ties are good for (she can trans­form the state of sol­id objects).

Chan deliv­ers one of the most remark­able and cred­i­bly earnest per­for­mances in the MCU thus far. The restraint of her line-read­ings and the air of irri­ta­ble con­fu­sion she brings to the high-stakes sit­u­a­tions in which she finds her­self result in a super­hero who is caught between emo­tions, at once depressed and at peace with her ulti­mate lack of func­tion. She is a kin­dred spir­it to Nomadland’s Fern, a pas­sive, clois­tered observ­er who is, via the breath­less spec­ta­cle of the land­scape, giv­en renewed fer­vour to extend her exis­tence and see what else is out there. She is unpre­ten­tious, and beyond an innate good­ness, she doesn’t know what dri­ves her.

What’s inter­est­ing about Eter­nals is how gen­uine­ly down to earth most of it is, reject­ing the time-hon­oured dual­i­ty of the flashy super­hero who also has to con­tend with the banal­i­ty of domes­tic life. This is more like real­i­ty, in that it is about com­ing to terms with small­ness and impo­tence in the face of so much cos­mic sprawl. Even the much tout­ed diver­si­ty of the Eter­nals them­selves – who count among them the MCU’s first deaf char­ac­ter and first Black gay char­ac­ter – is employed to rep­re­sent the real­i­ties of the human race through his­to­ry rather than as a route to point-scor­ing progressiveness.

Else­where Zhao has been vocal about her love of the cin­e­ma of Ter­rence Mal­ick, and it’s great to see how much of his imagery and phi­los­o­phy is baked into this sto­ry, rather than just idly namechecked. There is a breath­tak­ing sequence near the cen­tre of the film which is like a minia­ture remix of Malick’s own 2016 pseu­do doc­u­men­tary, Voy­age of Time, where the bal­let­ic, alchem­i­cal and unfath­omable for­mu­la­tion of the uni­verse is jux­ta­posed with the tac­tile inti­ma­cy of human life. This isn’t snuck in at the mar­gins, but front and cen­tre of the whole damn enterprise.

So there’s angu­lar, depres­sive char­ac­ters and a rumi­na­tion on the destruc­tive nature of time, but one of the film’s main accom­plish­ments is that, in its expan­sive plot, anony­mous antag­o­nists and scep­ti­cal con­cep­tion of the hero­ic sav­iour, it comes across as a qui­et­ly sav­age decon­struc­tion of the super­hero genre itself. Where films such as Iron Man 3, Thor: Rag­narok and Guardians of the Galaxy gave us self-sat­is­fied riffs on the MCU’s own super­hero lore, here it feels like Zhao is giv­ing us an X‑ray of a super­hero movie – we can actu­al­ly see the bones under­neath the skin, and it’s not con­ven­tion­al­ly pretty.

This may read like an attempt to flip faults into virtues, to reframe the things that make it ​“bad” as the things that actu­al­ly make it inter­est­ing and worth­while, but this is a film that is valu­able as much for what it doesn’t do as what it does. Its lacon­ic sweep is pep­pered with action sequences to keep things tick­ing in the peanut gallery, but more impor­tant is that Zhao does have some­thing to say, and she is not being ham­strung by all the con­trived mul­ti­verse tie-ins required of the MCU’s cen­tral pil­lar of films. Indeed, it’s brac­ing to watch one of these films with­out hav­ing to wor­ry that you’ve missed a bil­lion ref­er­ences to oth­er IP brand exten­sions (even the post-cred­it stings, which are essen­tial­ly pre-trail­er trail­ers, are jok­i­ly pointless).

Maybe the Tomatome­ter has lev­elled its judge­ment, and Zhao will end up being the last time that Kevin Feige risks bring­ing a seri­ous auteur into the MCU coven. But con­verse­ly, there’s always hope that this admirable if slight­ly mis­shapen exis­ten­tial mis­sive that’s dis­guised as a super­hero movie will find its own fan­base in the years to come.