When independent filmmakers are doing a very good job on a small budget, what can they do with a big budget?
For some time now, the commercially extremely successful Marvel studio has entrusted such unconventional filmmakers with the transfer of its comic worlds to the screen.
Since the director Chloé Zhao received several Oscars for the socially critical road movie “Nomadland” this year, people have been waiting eagerly to see what she would do with the “Eternals”.
Maria Wiesner
Editor in the Society department at FAZ.NET.
Follow I follow
The fact that these superheroes have never been mentioned in the Marvel cinema universe should be entirely in the spirit of their creator.
Because when the legendary draftsman Jack Kirby, one of the greatest in his field in the twentieth century, whose ideas still dominate large areas of visual pop culture from film to computer games, invented the "Eternals" for Marvel in the mid-1970s, he attached great importance to that this saga had no points of contact with the other superheroes of the comic publisher.
Kirby's decision provoked fans
No Thor, no Captain America, no Spider-Man should appear in the stories of a group of ageless characters whose god-like abilities were already indicated in names full of ancient allusions such as Thena or Ikaris. Kirby's decision provoked a number of fan letters from the first issue, asking why the other heroes did not jump into the new characters on their adventures (one mischievously replied that they had just not been there). Director Chloé Zhao can't make things that easy for herself.
Right at the beginning, she lets Sersi (Gemma Chan) answer a person's question why the Eternals had done nothing in the past against bombs, genocide and Thanos' attack on earth (which culminated in the "Avengers" film series) : "We had sworn not to interfere in human events as long as no deviants are involved." Thousands of years ago, a group of overpowering aliens, the Celestials (fans known in the form of Kurt Russell from the second "Guardians of the Galaxy" - Film), gave them exactly this instruction.
Sersi is now chasing such a deviant, a true hell creature made of shimmering muscles and too many teeth, through London and can only prevent the dead by quickly turning hurled buses into harmless rose petals.
Scenes full of seriousness and force
Monster hunting is easy for the Eternals, and non-interference is difficult. Ajak (Salma Hayek) warns again and again that the senseless struggles of one human tribe against the other did not concern them, but rather belonged to development. The engineer Phastos (Brian Tyree Henry as Marvel's first gay superhero) desperately asks whether only conflict and war can bring progress, since he sees more potential in humans, even if the development from apes to advanced civilization is not progressing fast enough for him. In one of the strongest scenes of the film, Phastos sits in the rubble of Hiroshima after the atom bomb has been detonated, shedding tears because new technology does not, as he thought, automatically go hand in hand with common sense. It is in these scenes full of seriousness and force that one recognizes Zhao's gaze.This is where she best fits Kirby's tone.
Visually, on the other hand, it was more oriented towards the Eternals comic miniseries, which Neil Gaiman designed in 2006 with the illustrator John Romita Jr.;
the organically intertwined interior design of a spaceship is a pulsating homage.
The director, who otherwise mainly works with amateur actors and interweaves human destinies with the poetry of huge landscape shots, this time has realized her signature in the vastness of South Carolina and the jungle of the Amazon region.
Angelina Jolie is not only allowed to fight
In order to establish the characters, which are completely new to the cinema audience, Zhao often uses her two and a half hours for flashbacks that span a full seven thousand years. In doing so, she feels the relationships between the heroes with delicate fingers, concentrates on a love story that is only hinted at in the comics, and picks the ensemble together from several years of comics (the staff at Kirby was so diverse early on that you can't get one today must make a big fuss about it). On top of that, the director is smart enough to trust her star cast. So Angelina Jolie is not only allowed to fight monsters in golden armor, but is also almost broken by the burden of the millennia-spanning memory.
Zhao is daring a similar advance as Joss Whedon did around ten years ago when he first brought the story of the superhero vengeance troop "The Avengers" to the screen. He also felt the characters for human passions and gave them ironic humor. Robert Downey Jr.'s joke as Iron Man and the war of words between Black Widow and Hawkeye, Thor and Captain America made the "Avengers" a cinematic hit. As corporations like to do, Marvel then tried to distill Whedon's concept into a strategy that was henceforth used for all subsequent films.
But that is exactly what no longer works with "Eternals".
The intentionally relaxed slogans of the script destroy the gloom of the story.
Where Zhao wants to respect Kirby's seriousness (and also achieves this in the better moments), her co-authors Patrick Burleigh and Ryan Firpo intervene.
One longs for the next action scene, in which Gilgamesh (Ma Dong-seok) throws away the pink cooking apron and, instead of chatting funny about craft beer, prefers to use his fists.
If Eternals is to advance the fourth phase of the Marvel cinema universe, the next time the staging is to be given more freedom to create a version of this universe that dares to strike a new note.