Eternals, mission accomplished – Piero Zardo

After Endgame, the grueling closure of the Avengers cycle, it was legitimate to ask whether the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) would be able to regenerate. Series like WandaVision e Loki they immediately gave comforting signals. Now Eternals by Chloé Zhao opens a new cycle (potentially very vast) and seems to indicate an evolution compared to the films in which, sooner or later, Stan Lee peeped out. From this point of view, the Eternals, complicated creatures conceived by Jack Kirby in 1976, when the first golden age of Marvel was drawing to a close, are the ideal material to take up the baton of Iron Man and Captain America. The Eternals of Zhao (and of Ryan and Matthew K. Firpo, authors of the subject) are fantastic characters played by a stellar cast but not obvious, solid, even in perspective. I’ve joked in the past that the MCU is engulfing and rewriting pop culture. Now the auteur cinema. But the MCU doesn’t swallow: it includes. An inclusive and winning model.

At the dawn of civilization, a mysterious demiurge, Arishem, sends ten superpowered humanoids to Earth. They are the Eternals. Their job is to defend humans from hideous monsters called the Deviants and help, without interfering too much, to advance our world. Each of them has different characteristics and powers, but they are united by absolute faith in Arishem and their mission. Defeated the Deviants, the Eternals must keep a low profile until Arishem calls them home.

So the Eternals take different paths. Also because not everyone agrees on letting humans slaughter each other without being able to intervene (who remembers the first directive of the Federation in the Star Trek universe?). There are those who decide to live in isolation and those who instead plunge up to their necks into the contradictions of our society. In present-day London (or rather: in the London of the days following the events recounted in Endgame), two of them, Sersi and Sprite, are attacked by a Deviant. The monsters are back, so we must reunite the Eternals to face the new threat.

The plot will become even more intricate and some questions will not be satisfied. But it does not matter. There will be other opportunities to find answers because (spoiler?) The Eternals will be back soon. Meanwhile, we can focus on the heart of the film, or the relationships between the various components of what is in effect an extended and dysfunctional family. There is an absent father (patriarch), a loving mother, a slightly crazy aunt, a daughter who has problems accepting herself, brothers who when they meet again wonder why they haven’t seen each other for so long, and so on.

In the hands of Chloé Zhao the blows between Eternals and Deviants, the inevitable threat to the survival of the planet and the disturbing universal questions that hover over everything, but also more earthly issues such as conflicts or climate change, almost take a back seat. The director of Nomadland manages to make us feel at home with these immortal heroes capable of solving global problems in a normal working day. It makes us feel at home (and never mind if it’s not exactly the family model of reference for conservative politicians). We are the eternals.

Eternals
By Chloé Zhao. With Gemma Chan, Richard Madden, Kumail Nanjiani, Don Lee, Barry Keoghan, Brian Tyree Henry, Lauren Ridloff, Lia McHugh, Kit Harington, Salma Hayek, Angelina Jolie. United States / United Kingdom 2021, 157 ‘. In the hall.