Eternals was a weird experience. It was the first ever MCU movie that I turned off and had to go back to finish in a second sitting. Whatever anyone could level at the MCU up to this point, nobody could ever have accused it of being boring. Yet there I was, drifting away from the movie, and eventually deciding to turn it off and watch something else.
Now, thinking back on it, I can’t really remember a damn thing about it. Nether, it seems, can the MCU, with only Captain America: Brave New World returning to any threads, in this case using the dead celestial Tiamut as the source of Adamantium.
Filmmaker Chloe Zhao didn’t let Eternals and the issues it faced slow her down. She came into the gig off the back of The Rider and Oscar winner Nomadland. She went on to direct awards darling Hamnet.
She says she doesn’t regret a moment of making Eternals, and still cherishes the experience:
“I loved doing it. For any of you who love anime, I know you know this was a girl’s dream come true. Comic books are the western equivalent of [manga]. They are very different, but I live in the West, and that’s what I had access to.
Eternals was not high on their priority list. Because it’s a quite unique IP and it [was] only on their list of potential players. You know, with Marvel, it’s very much a thing to find the right filmmaker before they say, ‘That’s the IP we’re gonna go for.’”
Zhao has also been a vocal advovate of the genre in the face of attacks from “serious” artists like Scorsese and Coppola:
“I do feel it’s important to not write off stories because we don’t consider them high art. The purpose of storytelling for me, humbly, is to create containers for people … to try to process what they need to process. Archetypes are such a great way to do it, and we see them in myths because it’s something we all share.”
Fair play. Eternals still left a number of threads hanging, from a voice appearance from Blade, to the introduction of Thanos’ brother. Maybe one day the MCU will get around to clearing some of it up?
