When I first found out that Chloe Zhao was directing Eternals, I was confused. I couldn’t imagine the Nomadland director making a CGI-heavy spectacle with ill-timed humour. I was eager, however, to see how she’d bring her style to a Marvel film.
In my article Marvel's Eternals: The Poem That Inspired Chloe Zhao's Pitch to Producers, I speculate what Chloe Zhao’s Eternals might be about. And as I expected, the film was about emphasizing the relationship between Eternals and humans which gives them a reason to protect humankind from any harm, including the phenomenon known as the Emergence.
Although this is a beautiful and profound concept to explore, Eternals lacked the time or the pacing necessary for the audience to feel emotionally invested in its characters or their interactions. And so, this bond between humans and Eternals didn’t feel deep enough to be a reason to believe that Eternals wanted to save humankind.
Part of the problem here, I think, is the rushed nature of the film. If you’ve watched Nomadland, you’d know what director Chloe Zhao does best. She takes time to build a character through interactions with people, interactions with the surroundings, and interaction with the self.
When a character in Nomadland laughs, you laugh; when a character does something quirky, you adore; when they feel lonely, you empathize. In the end, you leave with an appreciation of the little things in the character and her life.
In Eternals too, Chloe’s originality shone through — the tangible landscapes, the deep conversations between characters, the emphasis on cultures and their practices, and even in her poetic pitch to the producers, Chloe’s influence and love for deep, focused cinema was visible.
But when combined with quick action sequences and a story spanning several millennium, the film was a rush that wanted to quickly get to whatever points it was trying to make rather than breathe and focus on one emotion for a while. Due to this, what big questions or profound thoughts the characters tried to put forth became easily forgettable, often seeming like a children’s recital in a school play. The abrupt editing and the non-linear storyline didn’t help either.
I feel like Chloe couldn’t decide between trying to focus on the profundity of the story and the entertainment of a Marvel movie that she ended up making a film that was vaguely representative of the two, and stood at an uncertain in-between.
In the end, Eternals was a beautifully cinematographed and entertaining film—thanks to its fun cast and the mesmerising action sequences towards the end. It had elements of Marvel in its humour and its action. And it had the spirit of Chloe Zhao in its settings and character relationships. But neither shone through strongly, nor was there a pleasing balance between the two, that it ended up being a vague blend of these two different filmmaking styles.
Eternals is in theatres now.
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