Eternals (Zhao, 2021)
About the time my region went to sheltering in place to flatten the 2020 Covid-19 curve, I decided to try to revisit as many MCU films as I could in order of release to reassess where I was at with the engine that is driving the movie train these days.
It turns out that Marvel films go down easy for me, but none of them — none of them — wear well on repeated viewing. There is a disposable nothingness to them that is hardly morally objectionable but nevertheless manages to make me crabby whenever a new one comes out. My hopes get up, I am entertained enough in the moment, but it never builds towards anything. Increasingly with films like Shang Chi and Black Widow, I find myself resisting any investment in the characters or story because I know that by the end of the movie nothing much will have changed except that I will be set up for the next movie.
Some might say — indeed I have said — that such is the nature of comic books or serials. There is some truth in this reply. What I find most wearisome about Marvel movies is the need that they be positioned as part of the “MCU.” Individual movies can be interesting, intriguing, different. But entries into such a franchise, like pop songs, must be superficially different yet essentially familiar. And that processed, manufactured sameness is a big part of what makes Marvel movies feel like consumer entertainment rather than works of are.
All that is to say that Eternals is the most I have liked a Marvel film in a long time, and I suspect if I return to it in two weeks’ or two months’ time I’ll find it as flat and tiresome as all the rest. It’s not that it has nothing to offer. It’s just that it gives up everything it has on a superficial first viewing. It helped that I don’t know these characters, so the movie offers up at least some discovery. But when we get to the inevitable post-credits tease for the next movie, introducing new characters, I got the sinking feeling that I knew everything there was to know about these established characters.
This movie also succeeds because it convinces me more than do most Marvel movies that the characters have meaningful choices to make. The ever-escalating threat of destruction (city/world/universe/all of time) that characterizes the Marvel evolution leaves no room for ambiguity. This is the first time in a while where the reasons the characters fought mattered at all, even a little bit.
On the more annoying side, it is bloated as all Marvel movies are. The single most irritating thing to me about a Marvel movie is not just that these characters allegedly exist in the same universe as each other but that it is supposed to be the same universe we live in. Yet the implications of past events are never more than gestured at or alluded to, never more than retcon fixes. I wonder what a movie about the average human who lived in a universe that has had such things happen would even look like. The family of Hawkeye or Ant-Man or the Eternal living in Chicago with his boyfriend are the stakes they fight for, but the notion that a return to normalcy is even possible after such cataclysmic events is as colossal a failure of imagination or world-building as anything Left Behind has ever been skewered for. The world is just a stage, a backdrop, nothing more. It is supposed to be everything that the heroes are protecting and loving, but in reality, it is just their staging room, a place for them to eat shwarma between rounds of real living.
I don’t mind religious or cosmological analogies, but it’s not really possible to set the MCU in our world and yet portray our world as no different theologically (why are the calendars still BC/AD. I assume the existence of BC dates means that Christ existed in the MCU, though whether he was just an Eternal (changing water into wine or celestials into stone) or the only ancient myth that doesn’t have a historical basis must never be asked. Which sort of raises the question, why make gnostic or even satanic (immortal creatures rebelling against the God/god that created them) analogies if your bottom line position is none of its real, anyway? What’s the point of extracting truth from myth if there if myths are always only distortions of historical events?
Still, for an MCU movie, it’s better than average. I like Zhao’s direction, too. A lot of MCU movies come across to me as an average or above-average driver suddenly thrust behind the wheel of a muscle car, not really in control. I’m sure there are people who will be disappointed that this isn’t more….auteuristic….but confidence and competence go a long way in this genre.
Was I entertained? Maybe a little, to the extent that I was diverted for 145 minutes from having to think about global warming or the extinction of the species or any existential threat that can’t be turned back by simply deciding to use our superpowers. Will I see the next one? Sure, probably. Will I think about this movie ever again except to stream it as background noise while I am playing Candy Crush on the Ipad? I think you and I already knew the answer to that one….
