Avis des critiques

Eternals’ cinematography incorporates a little more natural light and open landscape than your average Marvel joint, but the demands of a $200 million corporate enterprise ultimately prevail over any aspirations to auteurship. That’s OK—a filmmaker of Zhao’s gifts has earned the right to try her hand at what, like it or not, is one of the dominant genres of the 21st century. She has also earned the right to make a bad movie, shrug it off and move on.

But ultimately it seems that hiring a writer-director who specialises in muted, documentary-like dramas for an action spectacular about gaudily-costumed interstellar demigods may not have been the wisest choice.

By making such an unadventurous movie about how crisis breeds creativity, Marvel effectively illustrates why even the most independent-minded of filmmakers are powerless to evolve an apex predator franchise that doesn’t have any Darwinian impetus to adapt.

That’s the problem: there’s just too much going on: it’s all headed towards yet another “race against time to stop the really bad thing happening” climax. It’s not exactly boring – there’s always something new to behold – but nor it is particularly exciting, and it lacks the breezy wit of Marvel’s best movies.

There’s a fascinating tension in Eternals between the unstoppable force of the Marvel project and the immovable object of Zhao’s artistic sensibilities. In many ways, this looks and feels nothing like any Chloé Zhao film we’ve seen before.

In shot after shot, she mines a quiet and poignant humanity from the group. Their tale, in her hands, doesn’t examine Marvel’s typical themes, such as the burden of being powerful; instead, it’s about the nature of everlasting bonds. Through a story focused on reuniting a disparate team at odds over how to approach a crisis, Zhao explores a resonant question: When you clash with those you love, do you confront the conflict or overlook it?