Angelina Jolie’s second acting job this year is in the newest superhero movie from Marvel, Eternals.  This is a film that I think will be divisive for a lot of fans, and non-fans for that matter.  It posits an entirely new origin story for the universe, which ought to set off the Religious Right (with good reason) and doesn’t really tie it into all of the recent global tribulations faced by the Marvel do-gooders.  In the preview, Dane asks Sirse who instructed the Eternals to stay out of the Thanos fight, yet the film deletes that little piece of dialogue and that very cogent question.  This premise is the weakest part of the tale, for it raises so many issues that it doesn’t address, other than to infer that even on a galactic level, oppression and bad decision-making and cruelty and needless sacrifice is the order of the day.

Chloé Zhao’s film introduces ten “Eternals,” people with superpowers to arrive on Earth thousands of years before civilization to ensure that the population survives.  They do, battling and defeating the evil Deviant monsters, and drift apart as the population’s survival is assured.  But then something happens, Deviants reappear and the superheroes must find each other and team up once again.  This time, however, things don’t go according to plan (they never do!).

This complex narrative, with its myriad of disparate characters, time periods, flashbacks, action sequences and human ramifications, is told deliberately (some say too slowly) and with a dramatic restraint unusual to these films.  Imagine a Transformers film set at half speed, and you get my idea.  I appreciate the attention to detail and the effort made to give each character enough salient characteristics to tell them apart and get to know them.  It helps that unexpected choices in relationships appear, and that even some of the characters question what is happening to them.  And yet it’s all a bunch of superhero nonsense when all is said and done and it is difficult, for me at least, to buy into what this movie is selling.

That said, I found it dramatically compelling, partly because the action sequences do not overwhelm the narrative the way they do in other fantasy films, and because these immortal characters do finally face mortality in some cases, in unexpected ways.  Cool elements abound, for each of the Eternals has some intriguing power, and working with the others is the only way to win some of their battles.  Yet, ultimately, so much of what occurs is based on what does not occur that I find the exercise a futile one.  These are people who choose not to interfere until they are essentially forced to, for a reason that the audience thinks, and some of them finally agree, is a load of crap.  It’s as if this story had nowhere to go but deconstruct its own premise, and that’s an awfully difficult thing to do successfully.  ☆ ☆ 1/2.  27 November 2021.