156 min | PG-13 | November 5, 2021 | Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures
Immortal beings have walked the Earth for seven thousand years, sworn to fight monsters and forbidden to touch anything else. Now they reunite to stop a threat bigger than any they have faced. Chloé Zhao makes Marvel slow down, and the franchise forgets how to move.
The Eternals are immortal beings sent to Earth thousands of years ago to protect humanity from the Deviants. They are forbidden to interfere in human conflict beyond hunting those monsters. The film scatters them across history and then pulls them back together in the present, when the Deviants return and a larger secret surfaces. Chloé Zhao builds the whole story around a single question. The Eternals were made to serve a purpose, and the film asks what they owe a creator who never told them the truth. This is a superhero movie that wants to be a theological argument.
Gemma Chan plays Sersi as the still center of the ensemble. She is gentle and passive, and the film mistakes that restraint for depth. Richard Madden plays Ikaris with a granite stillness that reads as distance rather than power. Angelina Jolie plays Thena, a warrior whose mind fractures under the weight of centuries of memory, and she finds more interior life in a few silent scenes than the script ever writes for her. Kumail Nanjiani plays Kingo as a vain Bollywood star and carries most of the comedy, while Brian Tyree Henry plays Phastos and grounds his scenes in a domestic life no other Eternal is allowed. Salma Hayek plays Ajak as the maternal leader, and Barry Keoghan plays Druig with a watchful menace the film keeps at arm’s length.
Zhao directs the way she directed her smaller films, with natural light and real landscapes and faces held in long patient frames. The cinematography favors golden magic-hour exteriors and wide horizons over the flat soundstage gloss of the usual Marvel entry. Zhao and her co-writers Patrick Burleigh, Ryan Firpo, and Kaz Firpo structure the story as a chain of flashbacks that hop across millennia and several continents. The editing has to keep stopping to explain who these people are and what they did to each other. The score swells where the drama should, but the talk drains the momentum out of every set piece. The painterly surface is real, and the storytelling underneath it never finds a pulse.
The ambition is genuine. Zhao tries to make a Marvel film about grief, faith, and the cost of obedience, and she fills it with quiet between the fights. The trouble is that the quiet has nothing to push against. The ensemble is too large, the mythology is too dense, and the film keeps introducing people it has no time to make us care about. Eternals reaches for the weight of a creation myth and lands on a long, handsome lecture. There is a smaller, stranger film buried inside this one, and the machinery never lets it out.