The new Marvel film Eternals (2021), directed by the brilliant Chloe Zhao, begins with a loose introduction of the Eternals themselves, painting them as stoic heroes, each with their own skillset and power, all capable of illuminating a golden-orange, seemingly inhuman animated light. They greet humans for the first time in 5000 BC during an act of saviorship, confidently and nonchalantly killing alien-like animal creatures — that we later understand are known to be “deviants” — as a team.
Everything feels like it normally would in a Marvel superhero movie. There are “bad guys,” “good guys,” and those who are helpless. It is the perfect ironic setup for a Marvel Cinematic Universe fan to be positively (or negatively) surprised by the film’s progression. For me, as someone who actively does not care about the Avengers as heroes, dislikes the Avengers movies and most of the MCU movies (aside from some standouts), Eternals fed into exactly what I do love about a huge production “superhero” movie: the effective use of actors, telling a story with a larger meaning that doesn’t solely forcefully feed into advancing intellectual property, and a visually striking landscape and set design that is as much part of the plot as the dialogue itself.
Zhao chose to tell the story using a few really impactful methods, including the emphasis on natural lighting and the use of nonlinear time. The film intersperses the present with moments from when the Eternals first came to Earth. It shows them integrating into different human cultures and societies; Phastos (Brian Tyree Henry), the intelligent weapons and technology inventor, “helping” human society “advance” through his creations and it shows the Eternals witnessing human greed and war for the first time.
In its flashbacks, we observe the film’s protagonist, Sersi (Gemma Chan)falling in love with humanity, immersing herself in their cultures, learning the languages, and helping when she could. Ikaris (Richard Madden), who was apathetic to humanity, fell in love with Sersi. Through his love for her, he found a way to “appreciate” Earth through her eyes. Each Eternals’ relationship to humanity was rooted in correlation with their power — Sersi, who had a deep connection to nature because of her ability to transform matter, viewed people and land with compassion. Sprite, who could not grow old, felt resentment towards humans for evolving. Kingo (Kumail Nanjiani), who could project cosmic energy projectiles from his hands, used his “hero” status to become rich and famous in Bollywood. In my opinion, he is the Eternal who integrates into society the most by not only adapting the languages, but also their religions — we see this when he prays alongside Karun (Harish Patel) during Gilgamesh’s funeral ritual (Don Lee).
Ikaris, who depicts an asshole conventional hero with a self-righteous moral code, shoots cosmic energy beams out of his eyes. He is truly not that interesting, and yet people continuously want to give him power. Ironically, despite it being a Marvel movie, the film overwhelmingly draws parallels between Ikaris and DC’s very own half-Kryptonian half-human Superman. It not only alludes to this, but Phastos’ child immediately assumes that Ikaris is “Superman” upon seeing him – it is an interesting Marvel/DC intellectual property crossover, especially considering Chloe Zhao drew inspiration from Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel (2013). But, despite the IP discourse, it makes sense that Ikaris is seen in a similar light – they are both foreigners to Earth with similar superpowers, they did not choose to come to Earth out of their own volition, and they are deep believers in their duties as heroes. It is this masculine, confident “boss” attitude that has historically been seen as effective leadership, which is why there is a desire to place importance on Ikaris, despite how seemingly little he cares about Earth.
While Ikaris never gave a shit, Phastos did and then was severely let down. His power was rooted in creation and advancement, of curiosity and solutions. He watched his inventions, which were meant to be tools, turned into weapons that humans used to pit against one another. He saw the ways humans destroyed themselves with evolution and how they did not learn from their mistakes. He sat in the rubble of Hiroshima, guilt-ridden and sobbing into Ajak’s arms (Selma Hayek), professing his abandonment of humanity, crying out that humans don’t deserve to be saved. Ironically, he did the most human thing of all: found meaning in hopelessness by falling in love and building a family.
The film also head-on confronts the complexity of heroism. The biggest catch of the “mission” the Eternals were sent on by the Prime Celestial, Arishem, was that the Eternals could not intervene with human conflict unless a deviant was involved. A character like Druig (Barry Keoghan), who could manipulate minds into doing whatever he wanted, did what so many humans wish they could do: stop fights, end wars, remind people of their humility, of their values, of their lives outside of dictatorship or “blind loyalty.” Druig resisted the “mission” since the beginning — he never had trust in anyone, except for maybe his crush Makkari (Lauren Ridloff), he was an archetypal rebel character who rejected authority and questioned the Eternals’ values. Druig proclaimed to the team while they stood in front of an army of humans attacking another army of humans in the year 1521, almost impossible to tell who is fighting for what or who, “I’ve watched humans destroy each other when I could stop it all in a heartbeat. Do you know what that does to someone after centuries?”
In this moment, each Eternal is weighed down by centuries of witnessing atrocity with an order to not intervene. Druig judges the humans, but the stark resemblance shows its face. What are the Eternals if not blind followers of a mission that they don’t understand the greater purpose of? Thena (Angelia Jolie) is told she has Mahd Wy’ry, a psychological condition that distorts her memories and turns her against her own team. She becomes violent and paranoid, trying to fight anyone in her own way, convinced everyone is going to die because of her past memories. Later, we learn that it isn’t a psychological condition, but rather a flaw in the programming. Arishem did not leave a spotless trace of the Eternals’ past memories. Arishem’s design has its holes. This moment of reckoning is also when Ajak tells the team that they can go live their separate lives. Gilgamesh vows to look over Thena, Druig walks into a mass of people he’s already possessed, eventually everyone else splits up.
In present day London, Sersi (Gemma Chan), is in the process of Instagramming a photo of the same tool she handed to a child in 5000 BC, now displayed on an ad for the Museum of Natural History. She’s late to a class she teaches, which is apparently a common theme for her. As she rushes to get to the classroom, she passes a statue of Charles Darwin and emphatically acknowledges her tardiness. Darwin, whose work is centered around evolution theory, is not a random placement here — it is a direct nod to the root themes of the film.
Sersi takes the class over from her boyfriend, Dane Whitman (Kit Harrington), who was killing time to make up for her absence, and begins teaching her students about the “apex predator,” an alpha predator who is at the top of the food chain and has no “natural” predators. Very quickly into the lesson, there is an earthquake that forces the children under their desks, and Sersi is forced to use her powers by turning a large stone artifact into dust to protect a student. Afterward, at a birthday party for Dane, he asks Sersi to move in together (for the nth time), but Sersi resists because she hasn’t quite gotten around to telling him that she is an Eternal on Earth for a mission sent by the prime Celestial Arishem to protect humans from deviants. He insists that she’s a wizard; we see Sprite (Lia McHugh) for the first time trying (but failing) to be amongst the humans, everything is seemingly normal in their world. It isn’t until they’re walking home that a Deviant with an aggressive amount of power shows up and attacks Dane, Sersi, and Sprite. It is clear that the Deviant is stronger than ever before and he’s able to heal himself, which was never part of their abilities. Ikaris swoops in at the perfect time like Superman, coming on the scene to save everyone from the deviant, and while they manage to escape — the Deviant remains alive and no one is completely “saved.”
After Ikaris finds Sprite and Sersi in present day London, he takes them to Ajak in South Dakota, who is lying dead on her farm, clearly killed by a deviant. Her healing power was soaked up by the deviant, which makes sense for why the deviant was able to heal itself. It is here where Sersi has inherited the power of speaking with Arishem, since she was the chosen Eternal after Ajak. Sersi learns Arishem’s true design for their mission to bring upon an “emergence” on Earth, which will kill everyone on the planet but will bring a new celestial lifeforce into the galaxy.
The entire first act of the film is suspicious. Who are these ‘heroes’? Can I trust them? What is their intention? I felt a sense of uneasiness, yet intrigue; I could tell that the film was working to gain my trust as it emulated the traditional, black and white mold of a superhero team-up movie. But soon, Zhao makes it bluntly apparent that it was never just about “heroes” saving a planet, but about the nuance of evolution, of moral ambiguity, of free will and conscience. The Eternals aren’t heroes, they are another creation of both tool and weapon.
This isn’t a new concept, especially in science fiction, but the superhero genre in cinema — specifically the MCU — has, for so long, tried to create binary depictions of superheroes. Sure, they can be flawed, maybe even unlikable, but usually, their purpose is to serve the “greater good.” The Eternals not only question their purpose, but they also challenge the idea of “greater good.” When watching the film with my Post-Soviet father, he immediately nudged me and said, “This reminds me of Arkady & Boris Strugatsky’s 1964 Science Fiction book It’s Hard To Be a God.” This cult sci-fi book was adapted into a surrealist, unsettling, documentary-style film directed by Aleksei German in 2015. It poses a similar question: where does blind faith lead you?
Similarly, I think about Eternals’ homage to Prometheus (2012), but most importantly, the Alien saga at large. I think of how as the saga continues, it is harder to tell the ethics of the protagonists — or what their mission really is. The original mission was always a lie, and the astronauts were always meant to be sent to bring back alien specimens for research. It’s another example of people, once again, being used as props and weapons for somebody else’s definition of “greater good.” The product is the same: life is lost for someone else’s righteous cause. And Ripley is the perfect example of what it means for the “predator” and “prey” to merge into the other, blurring the lines of what is what and who is who.
When Arishem explained the Eternals’ mission, he admitted that their existence came from what he believed was a design flaw when giving deviants the ability to evolve. The deviants’ initial purpose was to get rid of natural predators on any host planet so that the host planet’s population could grow enough for it to birth a celestial, but then the deviants evolved and became predators themselves. This is why he made it so the Eternals could not evolve — though it is unclear why he gave them what seems to be free will, autonomy, individual thought, and a conscience.
If by Arishem’s thought process, evolution is what stifles his grand design of celestial births by way of destroying planets across the galaxy, then humans themselves are inherently flawed. Our entire Earth and life structure is built on evolution. When we discover the Eternals are highly advanced programs themselves, I can’t help but wonder about the lack of difference between them and humans. This implements another Sci-Fi trope of AI/human relationships, but in this case, the Eternals are fully capable of loving, thinking for themselves, empathizing, experiencing joy, crying, and dying. It makes me wonder: what is it that Arishem leaves out? What prevents that from evolving? What makes them different from humans other than their internal structure and super abilities?
Again, Eternals is not about heroism, but about accepting humanity as it is despite its innate flaws. It’s a film not about altruism, but about free will and conscience — what makes a human a human? A program a program? A predator a predator? Sersi doesn’t devote herself to doing what she believes is right, though it is driven by some moral code, but to trying something new, an evolution of the same idea without mass destruction in the process. She led with gut feeling and vulnerability; she was always in a state of questioning, thinking, analyzing, observing the complexity of “right” from “wrong.” At the end of the film, she modestly said, “I hope we did the right thing.” There is no blatant wrong or right, but there was devotion to something else.
There is no villain in Eternals. When Sersi realizes that the deviants now have a conscience, she says to Druig, “That makes them more dangerous.” To which he responds, “No, Sersi, that makes them us.” Deviants were equivalent to Eternals, except when they grew a conscience, they rejected Arishem (God) and sought rightful vengeance while the Eternals challenged Arishem (God) and sought liberation. Both were being used by Arishem for a master design that they did not consent to.
The reason why I liked Eternals so much was that it went beyond the MCU pre-existing world, and instead actually used science fiction and superhero tropes to reject a bleak outlook on humanity. It asks you to accept the virtue of free will and evolution while critiquing the so-called natural order of predator versus prey. What does it mean to be an “apex predator” or a top-tier God who has all the power? What happens when God creates predators to balance out the threatened population in order to perpetuate “order?” What happens when these predators evolve and grow a conscience, realize they were used as weapons, and reject God and this so-called “order?” Despite all this nuance and these unanswered questions, at its root, there was a determination to reject defeat. In every moment that felt too big, too crushing to overcome, there was a solution around it; and oftentimes, it was rooted in love. Whether it was Thena’s bond with Gilgamesh and his unconditional care for her, that allowed her to remember who she was, Ikaris’s love for Sersi that despite his relentless beliefs, wasn’t able to follow through with destroying the Earth, Phastos’s commitment to his family and the meaning he found through them. While the others created purpose out of their lives, they did as humans do: love and fuck up and fall and find meaning and rise again.
In so many ways, this film was beautiful, big, and courageous. There was intimacy, humor, serious reckoning, violence, and not-so-subtle cheesy metaphors that comic book shit always needs. In these real-life dystopian times of humans teetering between overwhelming apathy and disillusionment, fear and exhaustion, something like Eternals offers a fight against defeatism. In the process, it brings something new to the MCU, and it makes this new direction exciting because it feeds into the Universe but it doesn’t revolve around it. It isn’t just a filler movie to advance the storylines or serve as intellectual property fodder — though it does both, it felt like it could be something entirely on its own. With a master cast, multi-layered, thought-provoking storyline and a clearly thoughtful, passionate, talented director, Eternals brought me into the Marvel Cinematic Universe in a way I never thought it would.
