The script takes the sort of seismic shifts that can happen around us in six brief months and blows them up on a geologic scale across thousands of years, through the eyes of the most consciously diverse cast in a superhero blockbuster. Zhao deliberately breaks from the well-established Marvel formula to tell a more sweeping and mature story - the sort of story the filmmaker is known for. Eternals expands the frontiers of the MCU providing hints about what its future may hold while also being a project of formal ambition. The latest film from Marvel Studios is equal parts puzzle piece and experiment. It is withholding and not inviting, as if, from the very start, there are two forces at war for the kind of film Eternals should be. This time however, it’s more lore than story, about beings from another planet brought to ours for a purpose the audience won’t fully grasp until the end of the film. A stable-seeming environment is revealed to be constantly in flux, sometimes with frightening and destabilizing speed.Įternals, Zhao’s follow-up to her acclaimed Academy Award-winning film, also begins with explanatory text.
In six months’ time, Empire’s ZIP code is discontinued. A sheetrock plant in the real-life town of Empire, Nevada, shuts down in January 2011. Chloé Zhao’s 2020 film Nomadland begins with sparse lines of text that set up an entire world of loss.
