. It would seem that the Eternals are not only Earth’s protectors ; they’re the inspirations for some of its most enduring, godly myths. Hence the opportunities afforded by a central cast this large and varied, whose personalities can’t help but pull the movie in as many different directions as there are stars. Jolie, as Thena — a warrior goddess who fights with weapons made of cosmic energy — gets to hero-pose her way through action scenes in ways that only Jolie can make look good.
Not that this is how they spend their days, nowadays. While Kingo is off in Mumbai fashioning himself into a one-man dynasty of Bollywood icons, Druig , a controller of minds, hides out in a jungle with a colony of laborers in his keep, and Makkari — the MCU’s first deaf superhero and, for my money, the smartest Eternal of the lot — hides out in the supergroup’s spaceship to wait out the centuries until it’s time to go home.
I’d been curious to see what Zhao, who up to this point has worked in a domain far afield from the Marvel Universe, would bring to a movie of this scope. Her previous films got attention for their mix of documentary realism — down to the use of nonprofessional actors — and the more movie-ish style of indie drama that earned her a regular spot on the Sundance roster. They were defined by the director’s insistence on immersion.
This would matter less in a movie less cumbersome on the humanitarian front — a movie in which saving Earth, weighing the one versus the many, thwarting deep, dark, intergalactic plans of total destruction, wasn’t such a tiresome, single-minded pursuit. Or a movie that didn’t go so far out of its way to beautify the Eternals’ ostensible empathy for humanity with indigenous cultural props hovering around in the background. They’re a part of this planet, after all, these alien saviors of ours.
Not that the Eternals — who get jerked through the movie’s banal melodramas, same-old action sequences, and snoozy central romance — are exactly triumphs of characterization. One character stabbing another in the back proves one of the more surprising turns in the movie. But the psychological seeds of that act are so loudly and nonsensically signaled that there’s nothing satisfying about it.
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