The Eternals: a nice reboot of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (review)

Does Chloé Zhao’s superhero film deserve the reception it received when it was released? Response this Sunday for its first unencrypted broadcast on television.

Updated October 29, 2023: Two years after its cinema release, The Eternals is broadcast for the first time unencrypted, this Sunday on TF1. When it was released, the film was crushed by critics, to the point of becoming the worst-rated Marvel film on Rotten Tomatoes (Ant-Man 3 has since taken this unenviable place). And the public also sanctioned it, with only 400 million dollars in revenue worldwide and 250 million in non-marketing budget.

Its director, Chloe Zhaohad assumed this failure, claiming not to have sought “to reach consensus, because it is an obstacle to any process of authentic creation” ! Will we ever see The Eternals again? Nothing is less sure. No MCU film or series has mentioned them since, and Kevin Feige has not ordered a sequel. The film nevertheless has its fans, and at Première we actually defended it when it was released. Here is our review published at the time:

Chloe Zhao Explains The Eternals’ Mixed Reception and Marvel Fan Reaction

Article from November 2, 2021: How to keep the flame of the MCU intact? During the pandemic, TV shows like WandaVision and Loki have kept fans on their toes. But we have to bring fans back to the cinema. After the failure Black Widow and the “first Asian Marvel film” in the form of Shang-Chi, The Eternals embodies the new Marvel strategy: making cinema films real total cinema events, real arthouse films; the proof by hiring a real star director, in this case Chloé Zhao, author of Nomadland which made her the second woman to ever receive an Academy Award for Best Director. And for her arrival in the MCU, she sets the bar very high, by adapting not one of the most popular comics in the catalog but one of the most ambitious.

It all began a good 7,000 years ago, when the Celestials (quasi-divine cosmic creatics) created the ten Eternals, superhuman beings responsible for protecting the Earth from Deviants, creatures sowing chaos and destruction. Using their powers, the Eternals defeated the Deviants, advanced ancient human civilizations, and slipped away posing as normal people. And guess what? When the film begins, the Deviants are back, and this comeback obviously foreshadows a catastrophe on a global scale.

At the heart of the DNA of the MCU – sorry for the abuse of acronyms – there is a formula, not magical at all, which we could summarize as follows: a mixture of very laudable desire for great popular cinema and prudence politically correct artistic around the predictable structure of the “hero’s journey”. With a good dose of computer-animated action scenes before filming, over which directors often have no control.

The good news of Eternals, is that the film gives the impression of wanting to exist against this formula. By taking care of his characters, by making them exist outside of a pre-digested heroic schema, by multiplying the flashbacks recounting several millennia of human history, by refusing somewhat heavy meta valves without refusing lightness, and finally by integrating a lot better its epic action scenes to its storytelling.

Completely omitting everything else in the MCU (except for very brief nods), The Eternals wants to be a new start for the franchise, in the form of an ensemble film of little-known characters, ready to be given a new cinematic life. Zhao, who seems to have had carte blanche – an extremely rare occurrence in the history of the super franchise, she is also credited with the script – thus opens her film with a opening crawl to the Star Wars, less to signify that it is a separate film than to use the same introductory process as George Lucas. No, The Eternals is not an absolute and visionary auteur film, but a good choral film, wanting rather to give priority to the collective.

Even if, visually, we are in a refined design, very 2010 – the Deviants are reminiscent of animalsAvatar– light years away from the visual delusions of the creator of the Eternals Jack Kirby (whose style would be impossible to transpose to cinema, as he completely embraces the medium of the page of paper of comics), the film works. The heart is there. The Eternals exist, sometimes clumsily, sometimes imperfectly, but this clumsiness and this imperfection do not derail the film, on the contrary: we end up believing in these overpowerful and fragile beings who turn their backs on humanity. Particularly during a very beautiful scene, that of the Sad Nightduring the pillaging of Tenochtitlan by the conquistadors in 1520, when the Eternal Thena (Angelina Jolie) goes mad with warlike anger under the weight of her memory and the overflow of her memories accumulated over thousands of years.

The Eternals also suffers from this overflow, which takes the form of more or less exploited narrative arcs condensing into 2h40 what could have fit into an entire season of series (Barry Keoghan’s guru trip, Brian Tyree Henry’s married life , the career as a Bollywood actor of Kumail Nanjiani, all this could have given good standalones…),: we obviously think of Sense8which seems to be the dream model of these Eternals -same colors, same global feeling, same gay-friendly vibes. If, at the very end, the MCU will regain its rights (this remains a constant in the universe: nothing and no one can escape gravity), it’s not so serious. We want to love these Eternals, well-embodied heroines and heroes, offering a nice reboot of the MCU in a more feelgood than we would have thought. Take advantage of it, because we don’t know if it will last.

The Eternals: the two post-credits scenes explained