Oscar-winner Chloé Zhao’s condensed epic brightens the possible future of superhero cinema with splendid narrative style while it crams the scope of what previous Marvel movies did in their first decade, and a franchised scale of ‘DC extended universe’ from Man Of Steel (2013) to Justice League (2017) into a single feature layered with mega-structural plot-arcs, and flashback episodes that span millennia of the Earth’s history. In essence, ETERNALS (2021) is the greatest story in the MCU. Its imaginative cosmology is a blend of sci-fi with ancient myths, where android immortals protect humanity from alien monsters. Zhao had read Arthur C. Clarke’s novel 3001: A Final Odyssey (1997) which explains early views of starship ‘Domo’, like a triangular monolith approaching Earth.
After ten superheroes finish their mission to exterminate monstrous Deviants, any collaboration slowly breaks down while they await further orders from Celestials. Now scattered around the world, their distinct identities blur with legendary fictions, especially notable for the characters of Ikaris, Gilgamesh, Phastos, Thena, and Sprite. When new Deviant mutants appear and their secret origins are revealed, the group is drawn back together for apocalyptic battles with space ‘gods’, and against each other.
Much better than expected, ETERNALS eventually reveals its artistic genius, and it’s a marked improvement on other Marvel adventures, like Black Widow or Shang-Chi And The Legend Of The Ten Rings (both 2021). It’s good to see gigantic space-beings presented just as they appear in bizarre comic-books, instead of a ‘realistic’ depiction like ‘Galactus’ in Tim Story’s faulty Fantastic Four: Rise Of The Silver Surfer (2005). In perhaps this movie’s definitive sequence, a dangerous Thena (formidable Angelina Jolie) proves that her ‘goddess of war’ persona cannot be defeated, or even disarmed, but she surrenders - albeit briefly, before she kills the shape-shifting humanoid ‘Kro’.
ETERNALS boasts just the right balance of timeless uncanny perspective, droll MCU franchise in-jokes, some worthy but sardonic human dramas, and plenty of SF genre thrills. With its grand ‘uni-mind’ link-up finale to demo gestalt powers, an intriguing teaser intro about Dane Whitman - alias: the Black Knight, and the greatest ever use of Pink Floyd’s classic song ‘Time’, this establishes new conceptual standards for any future super-teams to match, if they and their makers dare to try.
