Eternals

Chloé Zhao, whose last film was Nomadland, has been given ten immortals, a god the size of a planet and 156 minutes to introduce them all. The script, by Zhao with Patrick Burleigh, Kaz Firpo and Ryan Firpo, has to explain who these people are, what they can do, why they have not spoken for centuries and who sent them, and it spends most of its length doing exactly that. Eternals is among the handsomest films Marvel has released and one of the most tiring. We came out admiring a good deal of it and relieved to be outside.

Start with what Zhao and her cinematographer Ben Davis get right, which is the light. Much of the film is shot outdoors near dusk, and the effect on a superhero film is odd and welcome: gods standing in long grass with the sun going down behind them, a black ship parked on a beach, Sersi and Ikaris in a desert that looks like a desert and not a green screen. Eve Stewart’s Domo, the Eternals’ ship, is a dark wedge of stone and metal with gold script floating in the air inside it, and Sammy Sheldon dresses the ten in fitted dark uniforms with gold lines running through them, so that when they stand together in Babylon they look like a set of chess pieces. Little else Marvel has made looks like this.

The cast is better than the film. Ma Dong-seok plays Gilgamesh as a big, gentle cook who has spent centuries in the Australian outback looking after Angelina Jolie’s Thena, a warrior whose mind slips so that she sometimes forgets who he is and comes at him with a blade. Their scenes are the best in the film, a man in an apron and a woman who occasionally tries to kill him, and they moved us more than we expected, because Zhao lets them sit at a table and eat. Kumail Nanjiani has the most fun, playing Kingo as a Bollywood star who has hidden in plain sight for a century by pretending to be his own son and grandson, and who brings his valet along to film the reunion. Barry Keoghan’s Druig sulks handsomely in the Amazon. Brian Tyree Henry gives Phastos, an inventor with a husband and small son in Chicago, more weight than his lines contain.

The trouble is that every one of those meetings is a briefing. The film is a road trip with stops: fly somewhere, find an Eternal, tell them what has happened, cut to a flashback that tells us what happened before, fly on. Craig Wood and Dylan Tichenor keep the past and the present clear, which is no small job across seven thousand years, but they cannot make a scene move when its only purpose is to state a rule. Somewhere in the second hour we caught ourselves counting how many Eternals were still to be collected, and we were bored, which is not a thing we expected from a film with this many gods in it.

The Deviants are the other problem. They are dark, sinewy things, all tendons and cables, and they look like effects rather than animals; not one has a face or a habit we could describe an hour later. A film about gods sent to kill monsters needs monsters worth the trip, and these are not, so the fights are the flattest thing in it. Ramin Djawadi scores them with a choir and a rising drone, mournful rather than thrilling, which suits Zhao’s tone and does nothing for the action.

Against Marvel’s own habits this is a stranger and more serious film than the studio usually allows, with the jokes mostly handed to Nanjiani and the rest of the cast permitted to look sad. That is welcome. It then reaches, in its last stretch, for the same kind of ending every one of these films reaches for, and the seriousness has not bought it anything. Against Nomadland it is a film that keeps forgetting what Zhao does best, which is to leave people alone in a landscape and watch, because there is always another explanation due. It runs 156 minutes and carries a 12A.

See it for Jolie and Ma, for Nanjiani, and for the light. See it at home, where you can pause during the third briefing and make a cup of tea; the film will be explaining the same thing when you get back.