Eternals review: Chloé Zhao’s MCU debut is a cosmic bore

The Eternals was always going to be a risky proposition for the MCU. While over the course of 20+ mostly beloved films the sprawling MCU has managed to ignite rabid fan interest in characters as unlikely as a talking raccoon and a monosyllabic tree trunk, the Eternals are a very different breed.

Birthed from the wild mind of Jack Kirby (who either created or co-created Spider-Man, The Fantastic Four, The X-Men, and countless other Marvel characters with the more media-savvy Stan Lee), the Eternals are a group of ageless space beings who have been overseeing Earth from the sidelines since the dawn of time. Kirby’s complex creations are now hitting theatres with Eternals, a dense and often confounding film directed and co-written by recent Oscar-winner Chloé Zhao (Nomadland).

On paper, Zhao’s cosmic entry into the MCU seems like a thrilling and bold move. Known for her naturalistic and very human film work, Zhao is an unlikely choice to head a space saga that spans thousands of years and features a dozen principal characters. Unfortunately, Eternals is one of the MCU’s biggest misfires yet; an over-stuffed film that constantly shifts tones and perspectives yet still manages to mostly be a bore for its nearly 3-hour runtime.

The film introduces us to the Eternals, a group of 10 super-beings who were sent to Earth in 5,000 B.C. by the cosmic Celestial Arishem to combat the Deviants, a race of violent creatures. With a directive to remain in the shadows and keep out of human events, the Eternals have been combating the Deviants throughout the entirety of humanity’s existence, while shaping human evolution in the process (for better or for worse).

While the Deviants have remained out of sight for ages, the members of the Eternals have made (everlasting) lives for themselves. Sersi (Gemma Chan) has a relationship with a human named Dane (Kit Harrington) and lives with a fellow Eternal named Sprite (Lia McHugh), who is cursed to spend eternity in the body of a 12-year-old child. When they are suddenly attacked by a Deviant named Kro in London (voiced by Bill Skarsgard), Sersei’s ex-flame Ikaris (Richard Madden) arrives to fight him off. Realizing that the Deviants are staging an attack on the Eternals, the group sets out to get the band back together to save Earth (and themselves) from the Deviants.

Even while many of the characters are under-utilized, the cast of Eternals is incredible. There’s Salma Hayek as Ajak, the calm spiritual leader of the group, Angelina Jolie as the quiet yet deadly Thena, Kumail Nanjiani as Kingo, who has used his recent time on Earth to become a Bollywood superstar, and Brian Tyree Henry as Phastos, the genius at the heart of the Eternals who also happens to be the first openly-gay superhero in the MCU.

While it has become a cliché to insinuate a movie really should have been a TV show, the Eternals really would have been better served as a long-form show. There’s simply way too much to get through here, even with the film’s eternal run-time. There are too many characters to get to know in one film, piled alongside a millennium-spanning story that feels as unwieldy as a dense Wikipedia entry.

That said, there are some performance highlights, including Kumail Nanjiani’ earnest portrayal of the ego-driven Kingo and his hilarious human assistant Karun (a scene-stealing Harish Patel), along with Bryan Tyree Henry’s moving performance as Phastos, a tortured soul with all of humanity’s evils haunting his conscience.

The main issue with Eternals is that all of its disparate elements never coalesce into anything that feels like a single vision. What we end up with is a series of vignettes that occasionally work on their own, but never fit alongside each other in any meaningful way.

There are glimpses of promise in the film; in addition to some memorable performances, Zhao captures the immensity of the cosmic nature of the film brilliantly. Any time we leave the confines of Earth, the film opens up in a stunning way that truly takes advantage of the big screen experience. Even though we’ve had a number of MCU movies set in space, nothing has quite captured the awe of the cosmos and the beings that inhabit it quite the way Zhao does here.

The problem is that nearly everything else in the film falls flat. There are long excursions into the (very) far past that add little to our understanding of these characters and their current motivations. The one exception is Druig (the always unnerving Barry Keoghan) who can control the minds of humans, which pushes his non-interventionist directives to the test and pits him against his fellow Eternals.

For all of its hype as a “very different “ MCU film, in many ways, Eternals feels very much like any number of films that have cone before it. The Deviants, space dog-like creatures that look like they were torn out of a Halo game from 20 years ago are completely generic villains, and the film can’t resist the standard and derivative action climax we’ve seen countless times by this point.

Marvel made an exciting choice bringing in Chloe Zhao for Eternals, but the studio seems to have hampered her efforts to truly make the sort of thoughtful character study that the initial hype promised. Instead, Eternals is a directionless mishmash of tones and styles that feels like the cinematic equivalent of an AI-curated playlist; there are some great moments, but it’s sorely lacking a steady human hand to weave it all together.

Eternals is in theatres now.