Eternals might be the most important film from Marvel Studios. Not because it introduces a bunch of new heroes, expands the world of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, or sets up threads for future movies to pick up—although it does do all of these things. It’s the most important MCU film because it will tell us if the studio is going to keep pumping out the same exact kinds of films, or if it’s willing to transcend the genre it helped redefine over ten years ago. 

This is their first film from an Academy Award-winning director, Chloé Zhao, whose cinematic voice and vision seems antithesis to the kinds of films Marvel produces. Zhao, who earlier this year became the first woman of color—and only second woman in general—to win the Oscar for Best Director (for Nomadland), is known for her micro-budget westerns, sweeping landscapes and grand vistas, humanistic approach, and, more importantly, shooting on location.

Zhao fits the definition of an auteur, and Marvel Studios doesn’t typically play well with directors who have a strong voice. They’re notorious for their creative control, micromanagement, and emphasis on their in-house style. We’ve seen prominent directors like Edgar Wright (Scott Pilgrim vs. The World), Patty Jenkins (Monster), Lucrecia Martel (The Holy Girl), Alan Taylor (Game of Thrones), and Scott Derrickson (Sinister) walk away, be replaced, or have the final cut of their films taken away from them due to creative differences with the studio. “I wanted to make a Marvel movie but I don’t think they really wanted to make an Edgar Wright movie,” Wright said after departing from Ant-Man, a film he’d been developing for over ten years. The fact that Zhao is still with us today makes Eternals exciting because it’s our first glimpse at Marvel’s attempt at a prestige picture.

The end result is not very encouraging.

An undeniable truth Eternals makes crystal clear is that no matter how unique a director may be, they will succumb to the powers that be. No, not the Celestials, the God-like cosmic beings in the film who have the power to create new worlds, galaxies, and life. It’s Marvel and their refusal to buck their established formula. The snarky quips, villains who are evil versions of the heroes, cosmic MacGuffins, world-ending stakes, third act CGI-filled battles, ugly cinematography, interconnectedness, non-endings, etc. It’s hard to blame them, since, after all, the MCU is the most successful film franchise in history. But after two dozen films, it starts getting stale, preventing some of the most enjoyable installments from truly soaring. 

The film introduces ten new heroes, the Eternals, a race of immortal superpowered beings from the planet Olympia that Arishem, a Celestial, sent to Earth nearly 7,000 years ago to protect humanity from monstrous creatures known as Deviants. They’re led by Ajak, the group’s maternal figure who has healing powers, portrayed by Salma Hayek in an extremely wasted role. Kingo (Kumail Nanjiani), who moonlights as a famous Bollywood star, can shoot energy blasts from his fingertips like pistols; he also provides the required comedy relief. Sprite (Lia McHugh), who can create illusions, has the permanent appearance of a prepubescent child, which obviously causes issues for someone who lives forever. Phastos (Brian Tyree Henry) is a brilliant inventor living happily with his husband and their son. Makkari (Lauren Ridloff) is a deaf speedster who may or may not have something more going on with fellow Eternal Druig (Barry Keoghan), who can control other people’s minds. Gilgamesh (Ma Dong-seok) and Thena (Angelina Jolie), the best fighters of the group, live together in isolation in Australia. Both of these pairings have better chemistry than Ikaris (Richard Madden) and Sersi (Gemma Chan), the two Eternals who’ve actually dated for thousands of years. The former is a stoic Superman type who can fly and shoot laser beams from his eyes. The latter can manipulate and transform the matter of inanimate objects.

The Eternals have a lot of potential and are played by good actors, but they’re archetypes, not multi-faceted individuals. Ten characters is a lot to introduce in just one film, and even Eternals’s massive runtime (157 minutes, the second longest installment after Avengers: Endgame) isn’t enough to make these heroes feel like fully-rounded characters, because any time the film finally feels like it’s focusing on intimate character work, it rushes right back into uninteresting fights with Deviants. The frustrating part is you can really see a better film struggling to be set free from the restraints imposed by Marvel.

Nowhere are the two competing visions of Eternals more apparent than in the film’s two trailers. The initial teaser trailer is atmospheric, depicting beautiful landscapes—it feels like Chloé Zhao. It’s one of the best trailers for an MCU film I’ve ever seen. The full and final trailer hows a completely different film, with irreverent humor and jokes that don’t work, ugly CGI monsters, world-ending stakes, and MCU references like “Thanos” and “Avengers.” That trailer was what made me start to worry.

Not since The Avengers has an MCU film started off so rocky. It opens with a completely unnecessary opening crawl that doesn’t provide any information we won’t later find out ourselves. The opening sequence depicting the Eternals making first contact on Earth is, at times, pretty, but then it flashes forward to present-day London to set up the return of the Deviants. The pacing is so bad, editing awkward, and acting surprisingly stiff. There’s an unintentionally hilarious scene of Sersi and her present-day boyfriend Dane (Kit Harington) standing in front of a laundromat as she explains to him all about the Eternals. It’s so stilted I couldn’t believe they didn’t re-conceive and reshoot the scene.

The quippy jokes, Marvel’s trademark, almost always falls flat in this film. Zhao has admitted she’s not great at making audiences laugh, that she’s better at making people cry. The typical Marvel humor seems at odds with Zhao’s more pondering style of storytelling. Though this isn’t to say the film isn’t funny at all. The best laughs come from Kingo’s human manager, Karun (Harish Patel), who’s so delightful he may quickly become a fan favorite.

The plot of Eternals, written by Zhao, Patrick Burleigh (Peter Rabbit 2: The Runaway), and cousins Ryan (Me vs. U) and Kaz Firpo (Refuge), is, thankfully, completely standalone to the wider Marvel Cinematic Universe, with only minor references to other films and characters. However, despite its singular focus, the film still falls into the usual Marvel trap of not telling a complete story. The ending of the film legitimately pissed me off because it’s just one massive cliffhanger that leads into its mid and post-credits scenes, just like the ending of Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings. Not every MCU film has this problem, but it’s been especially egregious this year in all of their Phase 4 projects, including their television shows WandaVision, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, and Loki (Black Widow is an outlier because, well, the character died in Avengers: Endgame).

Instead of Zhao’s partner and consistent collaborator, Joshua James Richards, the cinematography for Eternals was shot by Ben Davis, an MCU mainstay (Guardians of the Galaxy, Avengers: Age of Ultron, Doctor Strange, Captain Marvel). While all of Zhao’s previous films were set on Indian reservations, sprawling deserts, rolling hills, and other areas largely defined by nature, there are many scenes in Eternals set in modern-day London and other cities, and the aesthetics of the cities don’t pair well with Zhao’s tone. The scenes set in the Amazon forest are so poorly lit and ugly I don’t understand why it couldn’t have been set in better lighting or in a different setting altogether. There are also many shots of the Eternals set against golden hour-draped backdrops, sun flares beaming against the heroes’ bodies, intending to make them look like gods. While occasionally pretty, most of the time they’re flat and boring due to, as always, Marvel’s insistence on flattening images and color to fit the aesthetics of their cinematic universe. The shots of certain heroes shooting off into space and circling the globe are incredibly dull compared to the likes of Superman doing the exact same thing in Zack Snyder’s films.

The Bollywood number featuring Kingo is awful and low-energy. The fight sequences are unmemorable. All the talk about Marvel’s first sex scene can barely even be called one, unaffecting this incredibly chaste universe. The onscreen kiss between Phastos and his husband is the opposite of passionate (as much as I like him as an actor, Brian Tyree Henry being straight probably doesn’t help).

I take issue with a few specific creative decisions, some minor, others larger. The Eternals are divided between fighters (Ikaris, Kingo, Makkari, Gilgamesh, and Thena) and thinkers (Sersi, Phastos, Sprite, Druig, and Ajak). Yet, if their sole intention was to fight Deviants, what purpose did the thinkers serve? And without diving into spoiler territory, there are two important moments in the film, one off screen and one on screen, that boggles my mind. It makes no sense to me as to why these game-changing revelations are even provided because it adds no benefit to the people revealing these secrets.

But the absolutely worst thing about Eternals is the Deviants, yet another boring CGI creation in a genre that has far too many of them. Having such huge and obviously fake creations set against real backdrops just doesn’t work (the film’s mid-credits scene also includes the worst CGI character I’ve ever seen in a Marvel movie). I still don’t understand how Marvel Studios, the most successful film studio in history, a company owned by one of the richest companies in the world (Disney), still pumps out bad CGI characters. After seeing Dune and its seamless marriage of live-action photography, CGI, and special effects, with the same budget or less than most MCU films, there’s simply no excuse for these animated characters to be so fake. 

And even if the Deviants weren’t so unrealistic, they’re not compelling antagonists. They’re apex predators. They’re animals. They don’t talk. We don’t know what they’re thinking. There’s a strange and random plot point of a specific Deviant becoming self-aware, and it seems like it’ll lead to something important, only to fall by the wayside by the third act.

It’s super frustrating because the Deviants are the source of so many issues with Eternals, yet the film could’ve existed entirely without the Deviants at all. And I’m not exaggerating here. If we lost the Deviant aspect, this could’ve been a film about the centuries-long relationships between the Eternals, and the Eternals’s relationships with humanity. Excluding the Deviants would have ridden the film of the bad CGI, bad action, bad pacing, and bad character development. I enjoyed every moment outside of the Eternals’s conflict with the Deviants. It’s really cool to see the film expand on the cosmic universe first established by the Guardians of the Galaxy films, and seeing the creation of literal galaxies from the Celestials. It’s fun hopping between different periods in human history and seeing what each of the Eternals have been up to through the ages.

It’s more interesting that each of the Eternals have different fighting styles, like Thena’s graceful yet deadly ballet-style choreography or Gilgamesh’s boxing techniques. Super speed is an ability already popularized in several other superhero films, like The Flash in Justice League or the Quicksilvers in Avengers: Age of Ultron and the X-Men films. But the depiction of Makkari’s super speed offers a different take on the power, showing her leaping and depicting more physicality.

Seeing the Eternals in different body sizes and races is another nice touch in a franchise dominated by white faces (starring several white men named Chris). The Eternals’s costume designs by Sammy Sheldon Differ (X-Men: First Class) are also a franchise best. They’re elegant and unique, a mix of Eastern, Western, and cosmic influences that somehow appears both organic and metallic. They’re timeless and absolutely stunning.

It’s refreshing seeing the characters against real backdrops and on location instead of the usual green screens and soundstages; it makes a difference, even in just the way the wind blows in the characters’ hair. The shots in nature and of landscapes, natural lighting, close ups of faces and expressions, are typical of Zhao’s films but atypical of Marvel. They’re some of the most gorgeous shots in the MCU.

The music from Ramin Djawadi, the man behind the iconic Game of Thrones score, returning for the first time since Iron Man, feels appropriately grand and ethereal. It’s among the MCU’s best (which isn’t a hard bar to clear, with most of the franchise’s music being forgettable).

Eternals is at its best when it’s about the group’s interpersonal drama. This group is a family and we see them support, argue, disagree, disappoint, betray, and forgive, as families tend to do. There’s an implied relationship between Makkari and Druig and an intimate friendship between Thena and Gilgamesh that I wish were explored more. These heroes have lived for centuries! They have history with one another!

The film is so much more interesting when we’re discovering the Eternals’s hopes, aspirations, and conflicts. They’re forbidden by Arishem from interfering in any human conflict. What does it do to your psyche to go centuries without being allowed to help humanity when they’re at their worst, witnessing all their wars, genocide, and other atrocities mankind commits against one another? What does it feel like to see loved ones die again and again while you get to live forever? When your fellow Eternals abandon you after centuries together, what does that do to your belief in family? One specific Eternal essentially asks “Why did God make me this way?” These are all compelling ideas!

The Eternals even debate amongst themselves if humanity is worth saving. Some of them believe humans are worth it, while others, genuinely surprising to me, disagree. We can easily understand why someone like Phastos, who has a husband and child, wants to save the world. But why does Sersi? She’s compassionate and is shown throughout history loving the people of Earth, but we never understand why or how she came to do so. That’s because the film doesn’t spend enough time outside of the action and world-saving heroics to adequately develop these ideas, which were better explored in another superhero film featuring immortal beings, last year’s The Old Guard.

Eternals is inarguably the worst MCU film. And yet, I can’t help but admit that it’s also one of my favorite installments. This is a film that actually tries, to mixed results, to focus more on emotional intimacy and character drama rather than fighting bad guys or preventing a world-ending crisis. It tries to tackle heady themes. It actually kills off some of our heroes, some even prematurely—and has them stay dead. There’s even an Eternal who decides to just leave during the third act battle (which is unintentionally hilarious), which goes against the basic tenet of a superhero movie.

The film is the MCU’s least cohesive and successful installment because of Chloé Zhao’s attempts to deviate (no pun intended) from the Marvel formula. The result is a film that’s unlike any other Marvel Studios film. Because of this ambition, because this is the least MCU MCU film, I can’t help but to be drawn in by its intrigue and still recommend it as a film worth watching. I hope Marvel doesn’t take the wrong lessons from the film’s negative reception (a franchise first!) and, instead, use this as a teaching moment and allow filmmakers to render their full vision without the typical Marvel constraints. But if the studio does take back the wrong lesson from this experiment, I’m afraid we’ll be stuck within the confines of the Marvel formula for eternity.

Three out of four Kents.

‘Eternals’ is currently playing in theatres.