I haven’t read more than a paragraph (spoilers, sweetie!) of this article lamenting the “Disaster” of Marvel’s new Eternals , but I really didn’t have to, not with this headline:
There are soooooo many Serious Critics who want Marvel (and Disney) to suffer a serious failure. It’s evident here from the very beginning of the piece.
However you may feel about the place superhero blockbusters have occupied in the cultural landscape for the past dozen-plus years …
But you know how you should feel.
… there is something ineluctably sad about the way directing one has become the primary marker of success for a gifted emerging filmmaker. Distinguish yourself in your field, as Chloé Zhao did when she won the Best Director and Best Picture Oscars last year for her contemplative indie road movie Nomadland, and you are ceremoniously handed the keys to the Marvel car—a gigantic CGI-enhanced vehicle that can navigate black holes and shoot rays of plasma out of its headlights, but that always moves in the same direction to arrive at the same predetermined spot.
Or, to sum up the underlying sentiment, “It’s ineluctably (!) sad that brilliant indie movie creators aren’t allowed to endlessly create brilliant indie movies for the brilliant indie movie lovers. Then everyone would become a brilliant (or at least moderately intelligent) indie movie lover like we are. O tempora! O mores!”
O filmcrit snobbery. Because when you start a movie review, not with observations about the film itself, but with bewailing that a great director has been somehow lost to the Inhuman Unartistic Evil Hollywood Marvel Movie-Making Track, you’re not here to criticize the movie — you’re here to criticize the entire genre and its leading production house. For reasons.
The idea that a director is only being pure and true to the Muse if they produce brilliant, thoughtful, low-budget, award-winning cinematic masterpieces is … well, yeah, snobbery. It makes assumptions about what is worthwhile, what is pure, what is right.
If a great, award-winning chef is offered the opportunity to make a lot of money creating a family-friendly tuna casserole — no tuna eyeballs floating in sauce, no molecular gastronomic crystalline noodle essence, just tuna casserole using what’s in the pantry — I’m betting it’s going to be a kick-ass meal regardless. Maybe not a once-in-a-lifetime culinary masterpiece that people will weep that they missed in the decades that follow, but something filling and enjoyable and probably with a bit of unexpected dazzle.
I do have reasonably good expectations, based on the MCU track record, the source material, and what I’ve seen so far. Heck, that the director won Best Director and Best Picture for her “contemplative indie road movie” seems like a good sign that it could be something really good.
As I said, I have not read the full review by Dana Stevens (I’ll save that for after seeing the film). But I suspect, just from that first paragraph, that she fundamentally dislikes the entire genre, and its conventions, and its style of story-telling, especially as packaged within a corporate franchise that isn’t going to do anything too radical or profit-endangering in its various outings. And so Zhao’s outing in Eternals gets framed as a tremendous waste of time and talent when we could have had Nomadland 2 or something.
(Stevens admits she has a bad “record” on “comic book blockbusters,” and that she really doesn’t understand the appeal of the genre, though the original Wonder Woman movie made her cry. She also brags, re Wonder Woman 1984, “Look at me over here, liking a comic book movie! Never let it be said every film on my Top 10 list is a harsh Eastern European documentary!”)
Stevens is not the only person who has expressed literary eye-rolling at the hoi polloi popularity of super-hero flicks in general, or Marvel’s installments specifically. It’s been standard fare since the earliest MCU movies came out, and went into overdrive when Marvel was bought by that other cultural bugbear, Disney — especially as such movies showed an inexplicable tendency to attract lots and lots of viewers and make lots and lots of money. That’s like red meat to some film / book / cultural critics.
Of course, all this begs the issue of what a “good” movie is. I don’t expect Eternals to be a brilliant “contemplative indie road movie.” In fact, that’s not the entertainment I’m looking for from it. And I can say that without maligning those who enjoyed Nomadland as out-of-touch pointy-headed intellectuals who want to tempt up-and-coming directors with low-budget, contemplative film-making.
Aside from enjoying the genre, I’m intrigued with Eternals because of some of the creative challenges it has to face, with its out-of-nowhere large cast that it has to introduce and get the audience engaged with, let alone the mythos behind it. In some ways, it’s the most ambitious MCU film yet, bypassing the slow build-up of solo films before group gatherings for a much bigger chunk of story-telling. Some few bits of feedback I’ve heard from early viewings are mixed as to whether the film pulls that off.
Beyond that, as a dyed-in-wool Marvel comics fan, I’m at least as interested in the bigger picture of how the movie, and the characters, fit into the larger MCU and the future. And I’m sure there are other folk who just want a pew-pew blow-em-up spandex Saturnalia of good-looking people fighting CGI baddies. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that.
Rise the chorus of folk like Stevens, who cry out, “But it’s such a waste of talent! Chloé Zhao! And money! Millions of dollars of money that could have gone to something much more important and memorable and artistic!”
But, honestly, would not have. Nomadland won Best Picture, but if every movie produced was another Nomadland, would we have a movie industry as we know it? Would Disney (would anybody) have created forty Nomadlands for the price of Eternals? It seems unlikely. Nomadland had a box office of $39M in the US, very respectable for a $5M budget. But Shang-Chi made $90M in the US in just its first weekend; Black Widow made $80M (plus another $60M streaming).
There’s more to the cinema than money, and there should be. But there’s very little without money.
And it’s not like Disney kidnapped Chloé Zhao and locked her in a room and forced her to make Eternals. Or is the implication that she was unfairly (and “ineluctably sadly”) tempted by filthy lucre to sell out her Muse by directing such a thing? Hey, little girl — climb into the Mickey Mouse van. We have candy!
That’s actually kind of insulting to Zhao.
Not that I think she’s not at least partially into movie-making for the money, but I can’t imagine that there wasn’t something about this project that intrigued her beyond the paycheck, just as other Marvel projects have intrigued folk like Brannagh or the Russo Brothers or Coogler or Waititi.
I did flip forward to the last paragraph of the review:
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.
Yes, “like it or not,” but also we’ve somehow flipped from Zhao being sucked into an ineluctably sad Hollywood money-making machine to her having the “right” to try her hand at it. I guess that’s … progress.
For myself, I’m going to engage with Eternals as a contemporary super-hero movie, a genre I generally enjoy, rather than demanding it to be something hitting the 2050 Top 100 Bestest Films of All Time list. Indeed, I’ll see it, not as a stand-alone one-off art film, but as a chapter in a longer (if open-ended) saga. I expect I’ll enjoy it, too, even if it’s just “predetermined” to be tuna casserole.
Sometimes tuna casserole can be pretty good.
Long ago I stopped paying attention to most movie critics other than a handful that I know have similar tastes to my own. I’m a simple man. If I’m plunking down $30+ for the wife and I to see something at the local cineplex, there had damn well better be more than a couple of explosions in it. I can watch thought-provoking human soul enriching relationship movies at home, and I probably won’t watch them there either. Because I am a crass and cynical old man who watches movies to escape real life.
True that.
I have a deep appreciation for artistic, interesting, thought-provoking movies. I have a number of them in my collection.
On the other hand, one of the first recorded VHS tapes I ever bought was “Out of Africa.” Because I’d gone to it in the theater, and thought it was an awesome film. Streep. Redford. A Blixen novel. Moving. Sad. Profound. Fantastic cinematography. Fantastic soundtrack.
I never watched it. Because when it wasn’t what fits what I want to throw onto the screen 99.99% of the time.
My bottom line, though, re the above, is that I don’t mind that some folk don’t enjoy watching super-hero pew-pew films. To each their own. But I find the utter eagerness of some folk to see Marvel crash and burn — on at least one film, but, preferably, the whole MCU — so off-putting that it makes me root for Marvel to not do so, not for the enjoyment that a good super-hero flick provides, but to spite those folks’ snobby little noses.