They're imagistic, elliptical and character-driven ( don't say tone-poems don't say tone-poems don't say tone-poems) odes to both human frailty and the immutability of the natural world. Zhao's previous movies ( Songs My Brothers Taught Me, The Rider, Nomadland) are intimate meditations about laconic outsiders and the insular communities they find as they try to secure for themselves a lasting emotional purchase, set against the vast expanses of the American West. How Eternals engages with the top 10 go-to MCU complaintsĮven the weariest anti-Marvel zombie among us can stipulate that the studio's hiring of Chloe Zhao to direct and co-write their latest film was surprising. Karun (Harish Patel), Gilgamesh (Don Lee) and Sersi (Gemma Chan). The only difference, of course, is that in the film, it's not we, the moviegoing audience, who are weighted down by that weariness, but instead a fractious, ten-member family of immortal and impossibly hot aliens who zap sinewy space-lizards with their eye-beams and finger-lasers and magic swords made out of gold filigree. So it's strangely fitting that Eternals, the latest MCU film, should take as its organizing principle that selfsame feeling of fatigue - the sort engendered by long years of observation, and the creeping sense that you're seeing the same stories play themselves out, over and over. What some critics and audiences are manifesting now, as they find themselves wading clavicle-deep through whatever particular numbered MCU Phase we find ourselves in, is something softer and sadder - a weariness bred by familiarity. It's not a backlash, really, because backlash suggests a reflexive reaction driven by a sudden, overwhelming need to reject, to force out, to detoxify. That's just simple statistics: Superhero films have become our cultural furniture they're the steady, unceasing hiss of universal background radiation none of us can escape.Īnd today, with the debut of every new film and television show, more and more prospective audience members find themselves aching to escape, to rid themselves forever of these children's characters and their microweave pajamas and their hypertrophic musculature and their too-tidy, infantilizing morality tales. If you didn't, you assuredly know someone who did.
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Maybe you muttered something unkind under your breath as well. You perhaps read the above and rolled your eyes. Ikaris (Richard Madden) and Sersi (Gemma Chan) in Eternals.Įternals is the latest film belonging to that great, teeming, not-so-riotous achievement in cross-platform multi-vertical corporate synergy/narrative cat-herding known as the Marvel Cinematic Universe.