The Eternals (2021)
The Eternals is the boldest swing Marvel Studios has taken in years, it's an intimate, visually stunning epic that rewards patience.
The Marvel Cinematic Universe has a filmmaker problem, and it has had one for a while. The machine is efficient enough and the brand is strong enough that the question of who is directing a given entry has rarely mattered in the way it would for almost any other studio's output. Directors come in, work within a tightly managed visual and tonal framework, and leave having made something that is recognizably a Marvel film first and their film second. There are exceptions. Ryan Coogler's fingerprints are all over the Black Panther films in ways that distinguish them from the wider slate. Taika Waititi remade the Thor franchise in his own image with Ragnarok. But these are exceptions, and they are outnumbered by entries where the director's identity is essentially invisible. The Eternals is not that kind of film. It is the most distinctly authored Marvel Studios production since the first Guardians of the Galaxy, and the most willing to risk alienating the core audience in pursuit of something genuinely different.
Chloé Zhao arrives here off the back of Nomadland, which won her the Academy Award for Best Director and established her as a filmmaker with a specific interest in people navigating questions of belonging, purpose, and what it means to stay in motion when the world has changed around you. Those preoccupations map onto the source material more naturally than they might seem to from the outside. Jack Kirby created these characters in 1976, and the publication history since then amounts to roughly 47 issues spread across relaunches, which is a thin foundation by Marvel standards. Zhao treats that thinness as freedom rather than limitation, using the near-blank slate to tell a story that has more in common thematically with a family drama than with a conventional superhero film.
The Eternals are a group of immortal beings sent to Earth thousands of years ago by the Celestials, cosmic entities of near-incomprehensible scale, to protect humanity from creatures called Deviants. Sersi (Gemma Chan) can transmute matter. Ikaris (Richard Madden) has Superman's general power set. Thena (Angelina Jolie) is a warrior of extraordinary capability who is managing a deteriorating mental condition. Ajak (Salma Hayek) leads the group and serves as their link to the Celestials. Druig (Barry Keoghan) can control minds and has strong opinions about when that power should be used. Makkari (Lauren Ridloff) moves faster than anything else on screen. Phastos (Brian Tyree Henry), Sprite (Lia McHugh), Kingo (Kumail Nanjiani), and Gilgamesh (Don Lee) also star. When the Deviants return after a long absence and the team begins to learn the full truth of their assignment, what looked like a straightforward mission reveals itself to be something considerably more morally complex.
The antagonist structure is where the film is most deliberately unconventional, and most worth discussing. The forces the Eternals face are not evil in any traditional sense. They are closer to weather: vast, indifferent, operating according to a logic that has nothing to do with human morality. The Celestials, previously glimpsed in the Guardians of the Galaxy films as something adjacent to gods, are expanded here into something older and stranger, entities that predate the Infinity Stones and operate at a scale of creation and destruction that puts the stakes of the previous twenty-plus films into uncomfortable perspective. It is a bold piece of mythology-building, and Zhao handles it without the self-seriousness that tends to make cosmic Marvel storytelling feel airless.
What gives the film its emotional weight is the question of free will, which runs through Phase Four as a recurring preoccupation. Black Widow examined it through the lens of deprogramming. Loki staged an entire series around predestination versus choice. Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings framed it as a conflict between inherited identity and chosen one. The Eternals puts the question to a group of beings who have spent thousands of years believing their purpose was fixed, and asks what happens when that certainty is removed. The answer the film arrives at is earned because Zhao takes the time to establish who each of these people are to each other before asking them to make the choices the third act requires. This is a film about a family processing a devastating loss of faith, and it is patient about that in a way that Marvel films rarely allow themselves to be.
The visual effects are among the most distinctive the MCU has produced. Makkari's speed creates a visual texture nothing else in this universe has attempted. The Celestials are rendered at a scale that genuinely earns the word cosmic. Sersi's transmutation sequences have a material specificity that grounds the power in something almost tactile. Zhao also shoots more of the film in natural light and in real locations than most Marvel productions allow, which gives the Earth-bound sequences a weight and texture that the franchise's standard studio aesthetic tends to flatten out.
The film is long, deliberately paced, and structured around a non-linear timeline that demands more active engagement than most entries in this franchise require. Some audiences found that a dealbreaker on the original release, and the film's box office performance and critical reception reflected the division. That response says more about expectations than about the film itself. The Eternals is not a film that works on Marvel autopilot. It asks you to sit with characters across centuries of shared history and to care about an ending that does not resolve cleanly into a next-film setup. The willingness to make that ask, and to back it with Zhao's visual intelligence and a cast that takes the material seriously, makes it one of the more genuinely ambitious things Marvel Studios has put into theaters.
If what you want is a filmmaker with a strong point of view working at the outer edge of what the franchise currently allows, this is the clearest argument the MCU has made that such films are possible within the machine. See it, and hope the lesson sticks.
