Eternals review – Chloé Zhao shakes up the Marvel rulebook to mixed results

With Songs My Brothers Taught Me, The Rider, and Nomadland, Chloé Zhao crafted one of the great triptychs of life on America’s margins, steeped in an earthy empathy and authenticity. It’s an incredibly impressive – and Oscar-winning – resume, but not one you’d immediately think of when looking for a filmmaker for Eternals, a comic book movie based on some of the most colourful and out-there creations of Jack Kirby. The result is as messy and conflicted as you might have guessed, veering between silly and serious in an erratic manner, though often redeemed by the most grandly epic set-pieces in MCU history.

With 10 main characters and a story that spans 7000 years, there’s a hell of a lot of exposition and plot to get through in Eternals, which is as close to an old-school Hollywood “epic” as Marvel has ever come. Though the sheer amount of stuff going on ensures that it’s never boring and its 157 minute runtime (the MCU’s second longest, just behind Endgame) doesn’t feel overstretched, the way we’re given the exposition is pretty bland. It’s fine when a giant, planet-shaping god (known here as a Celestial, the creator of both the team of Eternals and the Earth itself) gives a booming monologue, the sheer scope of the moment enough to get lost in, but the person-to-person dialogue is lacking.

A lot of the cast seem to be struggling with the script – not to mention a strange lack of chemistry between some of the leads – from Richard Madden stumbling over the silliest lines given to his Superman-esque Ikaris to Angelina Jolie fighting through an unsteady accent as unstable warrior princess Thena. Even Gemma Chan in the lead role as the most human-loving Eternal, the matter-manipulating Sersi, can’t quite make the impression she should, though Lauren Ridloff is compelling as the deaf speedster Makkari, while Brian Tyree Henry and Barry Keoghan have plenty of fun as two of the less fight-y Eternals.

Not only does Zhao have to introduce us to all of these characters and more, but the setting out of the story’s rules takes a lot of time as well. The Eternals are immortal protectors of humanity, but only against one particular threat, sinewy alien predators known as the Deviants, and the events of the film see them finally start to question the limitations of their mission as the Earth faces a truly apocalyptic threat.

The stakes are immensely high, and a genuinely gripping finale does those stakes justice, but the attempts to explain away the Eternals’ inaction during various human atrocities simply reduce various instances of genocidal violence to set-dressing, an odd moral choice for a film that has recently been expressly marketed as Marvel’s most progressive film to date. Counter-intuitively, it’s actually when Zhao is least in her assumed element that she seems to fly highest. Her gods-vs-monsters battles are weighty and possessed of a mythic grandeur that reminds you of the best of Zack Snyder’s superhero work, while the occasional trips to space are just gorgeous.

It’s the more “grounded” scenes that prove troublesome, though Zhao’s sensibilities ensure that this is the least Marvel-y of all the MCU films yet, pushing against the genre’s boundaries with admirable levels of ambition. There’s real location shooting, fewer smug quips than ever, limited connections to the rest of the MCU and even an honest-to-god sex scene, Zhao going out of her way to address a lot of the criticisms that have been levelled at this now mostly identikit franchise.

It’s a shame that Eternals brings with it so many new problems, but they eventually add up to the point it’s impossible to ignore them, especially after Dune recently showed us exactly how to do epic sci-fi worldbuilding. Here's hoping Marvel continue to take risks and break out of their own rut. The eye-popping spectacle of Eternals ensures it’s well-worth a trip to the big screen, though this first attempt at doing something truly new doesn’t quite cohere into the game-changer it clearly wants to be.

Eternals is in UK cinemas from 5 November.