Eternals Review

The ambition deserves acknowledgment. Zhao shot on location at magic hour with natural light, which gives the film a texture no other entry has, wheat fields and Mesopotamian plains and a Babylonian city that actually feels sunlit rather than rendered. The image of a Celestial rising out of the ocean is the single most awesome thing in the entire run. But almost nothing else works. Ten immortals are introduced at once, none of them is the lead, and the film distributes its emotional weight so evenly that none of it lands anywhere at all.

The structure lurches between present day and flashbacks across seven thousand years, so every relationship arrives pre-cooked and every revelation is delivered as a speech in a field. Richard Madden's Ikaris is inert at the center. Kumail Nanjiani and Barry Keoghan find the only pockets of life in the thing. The central moral question, whether one civilization is worth more than a cosmic birth, gets stated repeatedly and dramatized never. At two and a half hours it is a beautiful, self serious slog, and the most interesting failure the studio has produced.