Marvel’s Eternals opened late last year, and despite the buzz around its release, the film didn’t connect with audiences the same way most of Marvel’s predecessors did. It was the first movie from the Marvel Cinematic Universe to fail to enchant critics, and its long runtime and complicated plot might have driven away potential viewers through bad word of mouth. Yet, coming out of a pandemic and already expecting a low performance, director Chloé Zhao believes the result isn’t quite as bad as one might think, especially given the way it reflects on contemporary themes.
Chloé Zhao was surely the best choice to direct Eternals. Having just been recognized as an outstanding artist with the Academy Awards for Best Director and Best Film with Nomadland, she approached Eternals while managing potential influences as a blockbuster and influences from more independent filmmaking. With Nomadland being such a print on her vision as a director, many might attribute Eternals‘ failure to Zhao’s inability to balance both styles of filmmaking.
In actuality, Eternals is quite special precisely because it moves away from a formulaic structure that audiences have seen over and over in the MCU and blockbusters in general. Furthermore, the movie was supposed to open much earlier — right after Avengers: Endgame — but due to the pandemic, its release was delayed. Whatever humanity is going through at a specific point in time will always influence the way it perceives movies. Many films like Blade Runner, The Big Lebowski and Donnie Darko are now considered classics but were once poorly received entries. Eternals might be on its way to becoming one such example.
“The film itself is about existential crisis, both for humanity and God. So I think we definitely felt it was coming,” reflects Zhao about the film’s mixed reception. There are, of course, many layers to the way one might look at a film, specifically because the film is in itself a combination of layers. Eternals isn’t a happy story and is quite uncomfortable at times. It is about a group of beings with superpowers who lost their purpose a long time ago and are now forced to battle each other to either protect Earth and its inhabitants or watch its demise.
Zhao is quite firm in her response to the film’s criticisms:
“When people have that feeling, like they need to put order into things, they need to understand it by putting it into boxes. It is not about us, it is about them. And I say that lovingly, because they have a level of comfort [with] how their entertainment and their world – their beloved Marvel, or their beloved indie filmmaker – functions. That’s the order of the logic of their world that’s being disturbed. So I appreciate their passion, to try to make sense of it.”
The way moviegoers compartmentalize what they watch sometimes doesn’t allow them to look deeply at it. Audiences often jump to conclusions when the truth is ever so ambiguous. In effect, this is connected to what’s happening in the world right now. People are quick to judge a pandemic response, to judge war situations or to dismiss the fact that the rapid evolution of different societies in a globalized existence affects every single life in it. And that’s how Eternals can touch us all; whether one enjoys it or not, it is proof that good filmmaking can mirror these nuances, even when audiences do not realize it.
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