Starring Gemma Chan, Richard Madden, Kumail Nanjiani, Lia McHugh, Brian Tyree Henry, Lauren Ridloff, Barry Keoghan, Don Lee, Harish Patel, Kit Harington, Salma Hayek, and Angelina Jolie

Directed by Chloé Zhao

Marvel, out now

SPOILERS

It’s time for the Eternals to rise once more…

Welcome to the MCU, Chloé Zhao. Welcome to a literary universe with well-defined boundaries, a spectacularly odd creation myth and some quite strange parallel super families who never seem to meet.

Welcome to a universe committed to the status quo and to a fabric which seems intent on privileging American ideals and a creative handbook that’s turned out movie after movie with essentially a single formula barely hidden behind an ever increasing roster of names and settings.

The MCU is a juggernaut with which any new director needs to wrestle, and I find it hard to believe that anyone comes into the franchise without knowing they will be subject to the rules of the game which they’ve decided to play.

Zhao is tasked with bringing ten new characters to the screen, plus antagonists and secondaries who, in theory, have had nothing at all to do with any film so far. This all has to be done in the space of a single run time. You might argue it would have been better to do this in a ten-part mini-series on Disney+. I might agree. However, I also can’t see how you would introduce a tent-pole franchise like this on the small screen without losing its ability to draw people to the cinema. There is an economic imperative behind bringing the Eternals to the big screen first.

Not only that but Zhao brings a mature perspective to her film-making, one concerned with people and their emotions, their choices and their flaws. Finding a way to deliver to people who are happy that the God of Thunder’s deepest thought is whether he can beat up the Hulk without losing what makes her film making spectacular was a journey I was interested to see. How do you keep the audience who wants nothing more than flexing muscles and exploding buildings while remaining true to your sensibilities and the questions posed by humans with unending agency?

There are four names against the screenplay – Chloé Zhao, Patrick Burleigh, Ryan Firpo and Kaz Firpo. Burleigh wrote for Ant-Man and the Wasp and also Peter Rabbit 2 (the better by far sequel to the truly awful Peter Rabbit) while the Firpos have done smaller stuff. I raise this because the storytelling here is something to discuss in detail.

The start is a little shaky. We have extended flashbacks, an action set piece in London and a weaving in of several different characters whose main role is to display their powers and how they know one another. The dialogue can be a little flat and certainly there are a few moments when it felt forced.

Then, around the time the Eternals split up, having apparently completed their mission, the film finds its feet. I can forgive it this beginning – there is no elegant way to introduce an entire ensemble cast whose lives span literal millennia, especially with the story Zhao is trying to tell.

I have lamented elsewhere that the MCU struggles to deal with the serious questions it often ambitiously sets itself. The story telling here largely delivers on its promise even if it feels uneven along the way. I think that Zhao and her collaborators have managed to deliver a story that explores the human side of the choices we make, of how our agency can, sometimes, have no happy outcome no matter how hard we try. It also tackles questions of culpability, loyalty and duty in the face of disaster.

I don’t want to say too much except this is a story about killing god. Not in a Nietzschean ubermensch sense (although we really do have a plethora of ubervolk present) but rather in the sense of – what happens when we discover our own sense of morality? What happens when we disagree with those who we believed in?

The answers Zhao gives aren’t straightforward, and they aren’t easy. I particularly love how she explores all of this through what, without the superpowers, would be a kitchen sink drama about war crimes told from the point of view of the people responsible for those war crimes as they come to realise they’re Team Evil.

I think the story does a fantastic job of giving each of the Eternals something to do, each of them relationships which make sense and decisions that stand up to scrutiny. The eventual arcs work together in a way I found satisfying and weighty.

More than that I think it takes some brave decisions around jeopardy and sexuality – I’m not talking about representation alone but about the fact that for the first time in any MCU product we have protagonists having sex on screen. If you’ve had the misfortune to get beer with me recently you’ll have heard me banging on about how everyone’s beautiful but no one’s horny (and the fantastic article entitled just this available here). A single swallow does not a summer make but in the drought of people actually having any kind of sexuality in the MCU, this was a welcome oasis of mature decision making.

The representation is fascinating too because Zhao delivers something which wears its diversity so lightly you could almost lose sight of just how broad the palette is with which she paints. More of this please.

Although the third act ends in the expected set-to as people with superpowers punch one another, it does so in a curiously small way in spite of the stakes. I’m not sure how I feel about this – I like the intimate exploration of difference of which the violence is representative, but I also felt it didn’t quite catch me. I wasn’t thrilled in a way I’ve been elsewhere – such as in Shang-Chi. This may be the choreography but I think it’s deeper than that. When, in a soap opera, violence eventually arrives, it’s often shocking because it’s been foreshadowed whereas for most of us violence is blessedly unusual. In a Marvel film we start with violence and end with it – it’s part of the discourse and so it jars with the operatic stylings of the drama.

So, despite the fact the story was determined to leave us not knowing who might survive, that increased sense of jeopardy was off set by battles which didn’t quite land.

The film managed to make me laugh and apart from Richard Madden’s ever so serious Ikaris, each of the characters had lines which showed a wry sense of humour and the normal responses of people faced with the absurd.

I’m struggling here to say what I mean – so I’ll finish this section by saying that every human emotion is on the screen at some point and I enjoyed seeing actual people dealing with their problems. The structure of the film allows for this because, ultimately, the story is of one of dealing with our own problems, our differences and our flaws; not facing an external enemy designed to bring us together despite our differences.

However, here’s where I need to talk about what didn’t work.

The film is tonally uneven. I’ve already talked about the start, but the film doesn’t quite balance the subject matter with the Marvel juggernaut’s need for continuity, or the human element with the demands for violence. It is a problem rooted deep in the MCU, which represents difference as resolved via mythic levels of violence. The question for me is how, when you have superpowers, can you explore human emotion in a realist way. It may be there’s no way of doing that (Marvel is the High Fantasy of superheroes. There is no Low Fantasy equivalent that I can think of).

There are also plot threads left unresolved, not least of which is that surrounding the Deviants. Their story was the poorest realised part of the film, from the impact of learning what and who they are to what they want, they kind of hang there, coming on screen when the film needs extra threat but achieving little else despite being given a truly interesting premise. This was more disappointing because of how interesting they were.

Although it attempts to confront some of the darkest elements of the MCU to date, it feels as if it wasn’t allowed the time it really needed to show those things for all their weight. We’re left with several parts of a film which can’t quite find room to express themselves properly.

Lastly, Eternals is a creation myth and the problem with any creation myth is what it leaves out. In this case we’re presented with the Eternals as being multiple gods from Earth’s history even though we know those gods, like Thor, actually exist in some form. Furthermore, it doesn’t really bear much scrutiny to say that they were responsible for helping us develop nuclear power or other technologies and cultures when they all, effectively, speak English as their first language. It’s confused and although the diversity of the cast helps, it doesn’t sit well to say that the Babylonians were helped out by everyone but themselves. I understand the why of this approach but it’s also unexpectedly clumsy and sets a canon for the MCU which is strangely divergent and anachronistic – i.e. how do you get from there to the here where our stories really start?

Eternals is hugely ambitious, lovely to look at and full of humanity. It eschews the normal idea of requiring a big baddie to fight in favour of exploring how power can blind you to the evil you do in its name. It’s by far the most mature and emotionally grounded of all the MCU entries to this point and I can also see how that combination of things is going to alienate people on both sides of the aisle.

I think those who want more of the crash bang formula are going to spit this out as too flat and I think those who want more realist leanings in their fiction are going to bump up hard against the mythological stylings of the MCU and complain Zhao is lost in the process. Neither are really true although they’re identifiable edges to the story telling here.

For me though? I liked it a lot and hope this is a sign of how brave Disney is prepared to be in bringing men in tights hitting each other into the mainstream with a bit of emotional depth and maturity.

Rating? 8 celestials out of 10.

Stewart Hotston