Why ‘Eternals’ Is Dividing Audiences

The Marvel Cinematic Universe was shaken up this weekend with Chloé Zhao’s Eternals. Based on Jack Kirby’s epic 19-issue series The Eternals (1976), the film explores a group of immortal aliens’ relationship to the people of Earth, and each other, across millennia. Zhao, fresh off Academy Awards wins for best director and best picture for Nomadland (2020), pitched her concept for the film to Marvel Studios in 2018, and the film was developed as a passion project for the filmmaker, whose previous features Songs My Brothers Taught Me (2015) and The Rider (2017) were well-received indie dramas. So, it came as a surprise when Eternals opened to a divisive response, evidenced by the lowest Rotten Tomatoes score for any MCU entry (48 percent) along with the lowest CinemaScore (B) within that same category. While audience scores on Rotten Tomatoes are significantly higher (84 percent), Eternals clearly isn’t working for everyone, which makes the film all the more fascinating within the framework of the MCU and the ever-growing number of comic book adaptations.

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For what it’s worth, I think Eternals is one of the best MCU entries to date and an ambitious love letter to superheroes as modern mythology, something Jack Kirby was innately interested in exploring later in his career. Largely inspired by Erich von Däniken’s Chariot of the Gods, which made bold claims about alien influence on early civilizations, Kirby’s Eternals was a marked shift for the creator who had defined the Fantastic Four, the Avengers, the X-Men and most of the Marvel Universe. Eternals was Kirby’s chance to do something different, separate from the larger and more familiar Marvel Universe. Within those 19 issues, Kirby not only explained the origins of life on the planet but attributed all of humans’ legends of gods and monsters to two cousin races, Eternals and Deviants. Zeus and Athena, Gilgamesh, Satan, vampires — all stories formed around the existence of these strange beings, born of a cosmic experiment. Seeds of Kirby’s work here would go on to further define Marvel and DC, but also influence sci-fi films like The Matrix Trilogy.

But as fondly as we may look upon Kirby’s Eternals work today, this was not the case at the time. As soon as the series debuted, fan letters poured in proving the title divisive among comic readers. Much of the pushback came from readers who either wanted the Eternals to be part of the Marvel Universe or separate from it. Kirby wasn’t keen on referencing Marvel’s other ongoing titles within his book, though due to editorial demands he compromised and introduced a handful of SHIELD agents he quickly dispatched and the Hulk, albeit a cosmically powered synthetic version.

“Above all, Jack Kirby’s new series, The Eternals, offends me. … The frivolity in which The Eternals is written is what I am complaining about. … Let’s not sluff over the controversial for the sake of fun,” wrote one reader. “I’m casting my vote for the Eternals’ world to be outside the Marvel Universe. To soften such a radical break with the Marvel tradition, it could be established as one of the many dimensions tangent to the Marvel Universe,” said another. And there were shots taken at Kirby’s characterization of the Eternals, some of which parallells criticism for Zhao’s film, “Jack Kirby lives in a world almost entirely devoid of such characterization [as Stan Lee]. His stories have no villains. Oh sure, there are people who oppose the heroes but they’re never villains. … Kro [who decades later would be voiced by Bill Skarsgård in the film] is not a villain. He is little more than bravado.” Even then, readers clamored for simple dividing lines between good and evil, failing to see Kirby’s purposeful depiction of the Deviants and Eternals being the same except for their physical attributes, a theme which Zhao echoes and that perhaps would’ve benefitted from a larger exploration.

There were positive letters too, with some readers calling Kirby’s work a “masterpiece,” his “best work yet” and one reader catching onto the shift Kirby sought to employ to comics, “Eternals is different from anything I’ve ever read in comics. In this book, events move at a much slower pace, because there is so much activity on so many levels.” Again, this estimation would fit right in with a review of Zhao’s films. For 19 issues and one annual, the longest any Eternals comic has run this far, the letters pages continued in that fashion. Masterpiece or mess? That was the question at hand all the way up until the series’ cancellation. If anything, the takeaway from those letters pages is that consumers of comic book properties have always been the same, caught between a love for the familiar and the challenge of the new.

It’s ironic that much of the criticism of Kirby’s work has followed Zhao in her adaptation. As a comic and a film, The Eternals and Eternals are works, even with their flaws, that encompass so much about what both creators think about existentialism, grand design and individualism. Zhao has joined the ranks of Richard Donner and Zack Snyder as one of the few filmmakers to fully embrace the mythological aspects of these characters. The Snyder comparison is particularly relevant given the filmmakers’ approaches to the collective history of the characters explored. And Eternals was met with the divisive response as Snyder’s Man of Steel (2013) and Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016), which similarly took a deconstructive approach to superheroes and forced them to question their purpose in the world, through meditative and melancholy narrative beats, and featured a tragic yet hopeful ending. In a recent interview with the French site Film Actu, Zhao cited Snyder as an inspiration for the film, particularly her take on Ikaris (Richard Madden), saying “Of all the modern interpretations of Superman, Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel inspired me the most because he approached this myth in an authentic and very real way. … This film left a strong impression on me.”

As myths, these characters can be monumentally flawed, and the things that we take as attributes in most other superhero properties — responsibility, love, agelessness — are explored with the weight of real consequences. Much like Snyder’s DC films, Zhao approaches superheroes differently from the black and white, good and evil morality we so often expect from these films. By looking at superheroes as myths, they become more than wish-fulfilling entertainment; they become humanist experiences, representing the full swath of what it means to live as a human, to rise and fall in true Icarian fashion. Zhao goes a step further from the norm in that Eternals has no real villain. Characters take dark turns, betray and abandon each other, but this comes from a place of identity, who they inherently are rather than what they become. Zhao imagines how difficult it would be for beings who have existed for millennia to truly change, even when burdened with new information. The search for purpose and the inability to change course once that purpose has been found have been elements in all of Zhao’s films, and I’d argue that despite the superpowers and action sequences, Zhao isn’t out of her wheelhouse, but playing out the events of her previous films on a larger tapestry.

Even if Eternals doesn’t entirely work for all audiences, I reject the idea that it’s a bad or poorly made film. I’ll gladly take a film that opts for a massive swing, flaws included, over playing it safe. There is increasingly a sense within too much of film criticism of critics feeling like it’s their job to let directors know their place and stay within the confines of expectation. We saw this with Ava DuVernay’s A Wrinkle in Time (2018), in which negative hyperbole gave critics permission to dismiss the work and its ambition. This is an issue I believe happens too often with women of color who want to make large-scale studio movies. Whether overtly or subtextually, there are a number of scathing reviews for Eternals that look at the film as if Zhao were trying to make an Oscar drama, and not having fun bringing her own sensibilities to a blockbuster. So many of the criticisms levied at the film are absent from other reviews of Marvel movies that have the same inherent flaws of the genre. Why does one receive praise, and another doesn’t? Because Zhao has an Oscar? Because Zhao is a woman of color? Because Eternals isn’t the familiar ordinary-to-extraordinary story? Is it because the film takes itself seriously and doesn’t wink and invite you to laugh at what many still consider and would have only exist as merely kids’ content? Balk if you will, but there are implicit biases in terms of how these films are looked at according to who makes them and what they seek to add to the discussion.

For as much as critics and some audiences complain that “all Marvel movies are the same,” the response to Eternals is a testament to how much of those complaints are just lip-service for people who crave the familiar and have no interest in interrogating the subjects of popular culture and being asked to take part in an uneasy look at what heroism means and what we truly value. I’m not disappointed by the Eternals. I’m disappointed that even with superhero movies still being the most popular form of entertainment in the world, we still fail to understand and appreciate how vast these movies can be in accordance with their source material. Eternals is an achievement, and I fear it will be too long until we see another like it.