Eternals

You Don't Know Jack

or

The Marvelization of Chloé Zhao!!

 

Jack Kirby was "The King" of comics. That's what Stan Lee called him, anyway—and the two had their disagreements over the years. But, Kirby's influence in the funny-books from the 40's on towards infinity was immense, preceding anything Lee did. Marvel Comics, as we know it, flowed from Kirby's drawing table and legitimately his draftsmanship could be called the "soul" of that comics line, becoming its "house style". I could list the comics series and characters he created, but the list is long and there are other places you could find that information, and this is about a movie version of one of his creations, rather than some obligatory mention of its origins (which I seem to be doing, anyway). 

 

So...briefly...this is that. In the 1970's Kirby left Marvel to go over to the DC comics line—Superman, Batman—and wrote and drew "The New Gods", a series of books joined by a singular history that had nothing to do with Krypton or anything associated with DC's previous output.* The books were canceled at some point (but the characters retained) and Kirby went back to Marvel and did something somewhat similar for them, writing and drawing "The Eternals."

Marvel Studios has now made a film of the Kirby creation, Eternals, and it has a hard duty to fulfill. Kirby basically took the 2001 story-line—he did a comics adaptation of the film that same year—of an extra-terrestrial "god"—called "The Celestials"—who create two off-shoots of primitive life on Earth, homo immortalis ("The Eternals") and homo descendus ("Deviants"). The Eternals defend the nascent humans from the Deviants in order that humanity evolves into a kinder, gentler race where everybody just gets along. It's going to be a long wait, but The Eternals, borrowing Starfleet's Prime Directive, are beholden to not interfering with human history and just defending us mere mortals. That's the gist. The mythos has expanded and gotten wildly complicated since the series debut in 1976.

Eternals doesn't make it any less complicated, but they do put a different spin on it, giving it a couple of Mobius twists that have less to do with the comics and more with basic cosmology and energy equations. That comes up later, but the main thing for movie-viewers to know is that in the year 5000 B.C. ten Eternals come to Earth at the behest of the Celestial Arishem (The Judge) to fight Deviants to protect human evolution. They are (bear with me): Ajak (Salma Hayek) a healer, Ikarus (Richard Madden), with super-strength and heat-vision, Sersi (Gemma Chan) a matter-manipulator, Thena (Angelina Jolie) a warrior who can make any weapon out of cosmic energy, Kingo (Kumail Nanjiani) who can project energy projectiles, Gilgamesh (Don Lee) the strongest fighter, Druig (Barry Keoghan) who can manipulate minds, Sprite (Lia McHugh) a projectionist, Makkari (Lauren Ridloff) who's fast, and Phastos (Bryan Tyree Henry) a weapons and technology expert.

That's a lot of people to introduce in 2 hours, 37 minutes and one can look at them and go "Well, he's Superman and she's Wonder Woman and she's the Flash" and the rest have a lot of left-over powers—in fact, this Marvel movie pays lip-service to Batman's butler and Clark Kent, which is odd (I mean, they're so daaaark!)—but the basics are that over seven millennia they build up a lot of resentment towards the slow evolutionary process of mankind and they have a tendency to rebel and go their own ways. As the movie shows, that's not necessarily a bad thing, and given the proclivity of meat-puppets to do stupid stuff, one could hardly blame an eternal for self-imposed exile or discretionary mind-control.

Now, Eternals writer-director Chloé Zhao just won the Best Director Oscar for Nomadland (deservedly, I thought), and the nuance of that film, the story-telling through images, the lived-in feeling of the performances...and pretty much absent in this movie. Okay, there is some location shooting with battles out in the open instead of a disguised green-screen, but we've seen this before as the Marvel movies have been moving out of the standard New York locations since the second Iron Man movie. Performances are fine, but run the gamut of slipping dialects to "I've-got-to-take-this-garbage-very-seriously" earnestness. One gets the impression that there might be a four to five hour version of the thing because some of the transitions and montage sequences seem a bit disjointed. One says this advisedly as one realizes that the bar for audience satisfaction for these things is an action sequence every ten minutes.

For all the effort, and the obvious attempt to extend the scope of the Marvel Studio output and to make it a more inclusive film—despite stepping on some embarrassing tropes along the way—one has to say that it is considerably less than an involving experience. For all the cosmology bandied about (and it's about 5% of the "woo-woo" Kirby was capable of conveying) it comes down to trying to sell the concept that our Pale Blue Dot amounts to a hill of beans in a limitless, roiling expanse of space-time. I wasn't buying it, even if I was supposed to be rooting for Our Team. The motivations are too random and unearned...or even very well articulated. Given what has happened previously in the MCEU, I suspect that this is all some positioning of structural rebar for a bigger story to be revealed later throughout "Phase IV" of the studio's game-plan. But, at this point, I'm searching for a reason to care and I simply don't.

* Kirby's ink-stained fingerprints are all over comic-based movies—I mean, Thor, Hulk, Cap'—but the first time one of his wholly creator-acknowledged creations was realized on-screen was the character Steppenwolf in Justice League (and also Darkseid, DeSaad and Granny Goodness in Zack Snyder's Justice League).

Men in Black International

MIBI. MIBI Not.
or
"...Some Next-Level Shit Going On"

The economics of the "Men in Black" series required some sort of re-boot; if they'd gone with previous stars, they'd have had to save on a cosmically scoped series by restricting their location work to Will Smith's voluminous trailer.

Besides, the series needed it. The "Men in Black" organization in the previous three films had a galaxy-wide perspective, but we never got to know anybody but the two leads, that film's chief antagonist, and the organization's leader, which it it feel like director Barry Sonnenfeld's perspective-warping visual-joke-tags. It was seriously about time to expand the series' event horizons and give it a little breadth. That they've done with Men in Black International by introducing a new recruit. Call her Molly (the charming Tessa Thompson), but she's agent M in MIB (Do they have only 26 agents?? Then they can't even get a decent group-rate insurance discount!), whose encounter with an alien (and the actions of the MIB organization during it) inspires her to become an agent with the super-secret agency as an adult. She's farmed out—by MIB head O (Emma Thompson, the only past cast to return—at least they're keeping the best)—to the foreign exchange to learn the ropes of alien wrangling and memory wiping.

O sends her to the London office where she meets former agent T (Liam Neeson) who has become the head of the department—he's now referred to as High-T (so precious).** He pairs her with Agent H (Chris Hemsworth), his former partner on a Paris mission to intercept and neutralize a group of aliens called "The Hive." H is well-regarded in the organization, but he is a kind of a Bondish Man in Black with a sloppy work ethic and walks around like he's coated in black teflon.  

The plot—such as it is—involves a version of the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, who, with his dying exhalation entrusts M with a cosmic McGuffin that can be transformed into a powerful weapon capable of creating a Grand Canyon in any state without benefit of a a large river and millions of years. There could be details detailed that would expand the synopsis, but, they're exceptionally un-clever and we've seen them before. Aliens invade, assume human form, are looking for something with a power far greater than its tiny size would indicate, and...oh, yes, they're helped by an alien who has suffered at the hands of the invaders. This isn't writing, this is word-processing and the Ctrl, C, and V keys are getting a bit worn.

And that's it. This is going to be a very short review for a movie that doesn't deserve any more scrutiny, merely due to its lack of effort. Hemsworth and Thompson were delightful together in Thor: Ragnarok and they are not throughout this one, although Thompson tries mightily hard. They just don't seem to mesh, probably because Hemsworth's H isn't hamstrung and is allowed to lord it over the obviously more competent M, which rankles and flies in the face of what worked in the Marvel film. 

Or, it just might be that that film's director, Taiki Waititi, had a better sense of how to keep the two actors bouncing off each other, than this film's F. Gary Gray** does (although his work here is a fair imitation of Sonnenfeld's loopy roller-coaster ride that threatens to go off the rails at any second) and that seems to extend to the rest of the cast, including Rebecca Ferguson, who's great in the "Mission: Impossible" films, but is utterly charmless here.

Capitalizing on past glories in MIBI

In a Universe of ideas and the expectation that science-fiction might go somewhere where no writer has gone before, why would anyone settle for this re-tread that doesn't even try hard to do something new or think a little differently. Geez, they couldn't even try to do a compare and contrast with the American version, the film being based in Europe and all? But, no, that might be doing something beyond anyone's scope, micro-or tele. Hey, guys, maybe bring back Linda Fiorentino's Agent L from the first movie? I mean...anything?

I don't think the franchise could stand another one like this: been there, zapped that.

Ya really didn't like it, huh?

* Hey, maybe they could do a cross-over with Taken, and this time, his daughter could be abducted by aliens—c'mon, it's as believable as the LAST one.

** Gray tried to leave the project, supposedly, as the film suffered from Studio "regime-Change" confusion, and its producer Walter Parkes re-wrote the script that Thompson and Hemsworth signed up for, and he even directed parts of it. Geez, maybe the next movie should have a race of incompetent aliens trying make sense of an invasion plot when their leader dies.

Just look here and let's forget it ever happened.