Eternals, the latest installment in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, has been poised as her powerhouse, meant to push this slick, tangled universe further than ever before, into a realm where an auteur’s visuals stick and the characters — played by the likes of Angelina Jolie and Salma Hayek — seem soulful, rather than like action figures with scant interiority beyond what the narrative needs to push a story along.
Spanning 7,000 years of human history, the film follows an immortal superhero group from a faraway planet tasked with shaping humanity’s development and fending off the big bads — the Deviants, a group of colorful CGI monsters that look like countless other colorful CGI monsters— with a variety of matter-manipulating, energy-harnessing, weapons-transmuting abilities.
Zhao has neither the deftness nor the interest in elevating this homogenous speaking style, but the reliance on quippy humor speaks more to how Marvel and its stakeholders misunderstand the allure of stars in the first place.
The grander Eternals story, littered with MCU plot holes that get carelessly papered over as more and more heroes and villains make themselves known That doesn’t stop him from getting his own end-credits scene.
Given that the script doesn’t treat the actors as individuals, but rather as vehicles for bland jokes and exposition, one might turn to the action sequences to glean any idea of who these people are.
Once again, Marvel has ensembled an undeniably gorgeous array of actors only to have the sexual chemistry between them be slim or nonexistent.
Marvel has grown so powerful in part because of how it treats diversity and identity as a checklist; the Eternals characters indeed range in ability, race, and sexuality.
What’s the point in pulling in Hollywood stars if you’re just going to obliterate them? Jolie is one of the most fascinating, complicated, and high-profile celebrities to have ever existed.