Eternals reviews praise Chloé Zhao's 'ambitious approach,' criticize 'standard' Marvel formula
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The results of Marvel's latest battle are in — but critics' opinions are mixed on who won.
That battle is between Eternals director Chloé Zhao — who took home the Best Director Oscar in April for her soulful Western Nomadland — and the Marvel Studios formula, which critics are largely bemoaning in their appraisals of Zhao's first blockbuster effort.
As EW's Leah Greenblatt put it in her B review, "It's a long way from Frances McDormand in a van to the center of the MCU, and no mere mortal is stronger than a $20 billion franchise; Eternals still molds itself faithfully to Marvel form — the winky banter and convoluted origin myths, exotic scene-setting (London! Hiroshima! Ancient Babylon!) and clanging third-act showdowns."
Still, she continued, "Zhao's imprint is also hard to miss in the movie's steady thrum of melancholy and its deeper, odder character arcs. Her sprawling cast's superhuman powers tend to belie their extremely human traits: They fight, fall in love, and fall prey to their own egos; some have serious day jobs and even non-Eternal husbands (or at least Brian Tyree Henry's Phastos does)."
Sophie Mutevelian/Marvel Studios Ikaris (Richard Madden) and Sersi (Gemma Chan) in 'Eternals.'
Indeed, some critics feel that Zhao's touch, coupled with a "refreshingly diverse" cast (as The Guardian's Steve Rose put it) is enough to make Eternals stand out from the rest of the Marvel library. "Zhao's delicate examination of her characters outshines Eternals' duller and more convoluted moments," wrote Shirley Li of The Atlantic, who also praised the way Zhao managed to "sink a Marvel-size budget into a personal character study and still keep it feeling like a sweeping blockbuster."
Other reviewers, however, were less impressed. These sentiments are perhaps best summed up by IndieWire's David Ehrlich: "Alas, this elastic mega-franchise only allows itself to be stretched so far before it snaps back to its default shape. For all of the incidental choices that set Eternals apart and seem to promise that Marvel has found the chutzpah required to break — or even bend — the vibranium blockbuster mold it so boldly forged in the first place, Zhao's film is still just adhering to a template."
Or, as Justin Chang of the Los Angeles Times wrote, "You walk out in the depressing realization that you've just seen one of the more interesting movies Marvel will ever make, and hopefully the least interesting one Chloé Zhao will ever make."
Marvel Studios Kumail Nanjiani's Kingo doing with that actor calls 'finger guns' in Marvel's 'Eternals.'
Eternals, which currently sits at a 73 percent "Fresh" rating on Rotten Tomatoes at the time of publication, hits theaters Nov. 5. See excerpts from more critics' reviews below.
Leah Greenblatt (Entertainment Weekly)
"Zhao, who co-penned the script with several credited screenwriters, moves through her assorted story lines in a way that seems almost deliberately unrushed, stopping often and leisurely for extended character moments... The looping flashback structure and relaxed, intimate pacing has the odd effect of making the fate of the free world feel a lot less urgent than it probably should; the movie frequently comes off less like a standard MCU tentpole than a metaphysical family drama whose black sheep just happens to be Thanos. That probably won't thrill a lot of fans who come for the wham-bam deluge of intergalactic battlefields and Infinity Stones, even though there's more than enough byzantine mythology and noisy CG battles in its 2-hour-and-37-minute runtime."
Owen Gleiberman (Variety)
"It's clear that Zhao, in signing up for this project, made a decision to put her highly expressive and idiosyncratic style on the shelf, and to embrace the straight-up expository conventionality of Marvel filmmaking. That's something of a disappointment. Yet Zhao's sensibility, to a degree, is there — in the casual humanity of the characters, in the flow of quip and conflict and passion (at times romantic), in the beauty of the effects, in the deceptively effortless way that Zhao scales up her logistical skills. She's a master craftswoman, and Eternals, while too long (157 minutes? really?), is a squarely fun and gratifying watch."
Justin Chang (Los Angeles Times)
"The Eternals' on-screen struggle, pitting them against the whims of a grimly authoritarian overlord, too precisely mirrors their relationship to the Disney/Marvel corporate apparatus that created them and that will exploit them until they have exhausted their potential. What initially seemed fresh and invigorating devolves into something you've seen countless times before: The fate of the world hinges on an epic burst of teamwork, as well as one character's perfunctory realization of long-suppressed potential... You walk out in the depressing realization that you've just seen one of the more interesting movies Marvel will ever make, and hopefully the least interesting one Chloé Zhao will ever make."
Shirley Li (The Atlantic)
"Zhao's delicate examination of her characters outshines Eternals' duller and more convoluted moments. The climax centers on the Eternals' internal strife, and after spending so much time with this family, seeing them fight is both agonizing and breathtaking. No buildings fall, no hordes of alien armies invade, and no civilians are shown screaming in terror. The most tragic blow doesn't come from a fist, but from a single look exchanged between two characters. That's an ambitious approach — to sink a Marvel-size budget into a personal character study and still keep it feeling like a sweeping blockbuster. Only Zhao could have made it so."
David Rooney (The Hollywood Reporter)
"It was probably unrealistic to expect Chloé Zhao... to completely reinvent the superhero movie. Nevertheless, Eternals does bend the ubiquitous fantasy genre to some degree to fit the director's customary vein of humanistic intimacy measured against an expansive natural-world canvas. The attention to character, group dynamics and emotional texture makes the film often feel more alive in its quieter moments than its fairly routine CG action clashes. But the depth of feeling helps counter the choppy storytelling in this new tangent in the MCU narrative."
David Ehrlich (IndieWire)
"Marvel has made a Dune-sized, Dune-length, and almost Dune-portentous superhero movie about literally confronting God. On paper, that should be enough to make Eternals a radical departure from the rest of the MCU, as well as a sharp escalation from the previous two installments of the mega-franchise's current phase (the no-stakes prequel Black Widow and the relatively self-contained origin story Shang-Chi). In practice, it still amounts to several hours of watching good actors save the world from bad CGI, as philosophical differences erupt into a weightless battle royale while civilization itself hangs in the balance. By making such an unadventurous movie about how crisis breeds creativity, Marvel effectively illustrates why even the most independent-minded of filmmakers are powerless to evolve an apex predator franchise that doesn't have any Darwinian impetus to adapt."
Esther Zuckerman (Thrillist)
"Marvel has gotten the reputation for hiring fantastic filmmakers and flattening their styles, and while Eternals certainly doesn't play like anything else Zhao has done, it also doesn't mute her vision. Amid all the magic and skin-tight costumes, Zhao has made a movie that's both humane and earthy, but also wonderfully weird, one where the internal debates between superhumans are more interesting than the punches they throw."
A.A. Dowd (The A.V. Club)
"Eternals proves, maybe once and for all, that who's behind the camera of these quality-controlled blockbusters may not matter so much. What's the difference in shooting a real landscape and just generating one on a laptop if it's going to serve as wallpaper for another round of visually undistinguished comic-book combat? As an action movie, Marvel's latest offers more of the weightless digital same: variably convincing avatars of the actors darting across ashen beachfronts, tossing fireballs and tendrils. Where Nomadland evinced a clear Terrence Malick influence in its fluid, butterfly-in-the-wind camerawork and cutting, Eternals occasionally suggests what The Tree of Life might look like with Kevin Feige micromanaging the awe and wonder over the filmmaker's shoulder. However singular Zhao's sensibilities, they're no match for the uniformity of Marvel's previsualization protocol."
Nicholas Barber (BBC)
"Eternals is adapted from a series of far-out 1970s comics by the great Jack Kirby, and traces remain of his visionary design, but Zhao and her three co-writers have weighed it down with lots of rudimentary dialogue, a daft plan — 'If we can assemble device X and attach it to device Y then we can defeat enemy Z' — and a standard CGI-heavy showdown to round things off. The results aren't terrible. They're definitely watchable. But considering that this sci-fi saga is directed by Zhao, and that its story spans the creation of the Universe and the fate of the planet, it would have been reasonable to expect it to prompt slack-jawed wonder rather than the grudging appreciation of an efficient, workmanlike job. Eternals may not be the worst of Marvel's movies, but it's undoubtedly the most disappointing."
Robert Abele (TheWrap)
"There is fun; plenty of stunts, jokes, combat, visuals, twists and, for the romantics, more than one love story, and not all of them straight, thank god. The performances do their jobs, too, especially when, outside the regulation superhero pantomiming. Zhao's compassionate gaze requires something extra, for love, destiny, the planet, everything. After all, there might be a volcano erupting in the background, or a planet-sized being in the frame. But what makes Eternals feel special is that, for once, the director genuinely cares as much about the character within that spectacle, as the spectacle itself."
Steve Rose (The Guardian)
"There's just too much going on: It's all headed towards yet another 'race against time to stop the really bad thing happening' climax. It's not exactly boring — there's always something new to behold — but nor it is particularly exciting, and it lacks the breezy wit of Marvel's best movies. One of the strengths of the MCU to date is how it has taken time to define each character individually and lay out the grand narratives over successive movies, building a sense of momentum. Here, it's all thrown at us at once. It's like coming into Avengers: Endgame cold without having seen any of the preceding installments. Most mortals will simply find it too much. Bigger isn't always better."
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