Chloé Zhao won an Oscar for Nomadland, a film made of weather, silence and people who barely say what they feel. Marvel hired her anyway. The result is Eternals, the 26th film in the MCU and the first to lose the critics. The Guardian was blunt about why: Zhao at her best is delicate and intimate, and that is exactly what a comic-book action machine crushes. Apart from a few wistful magic-hour shots, the paper found little in the look of the film to suggest her vision survived the genre. I mostly agree. I also find the film more interesting than that verdict allows.

Start with the premise. In 5000 BC, ten immortal beings are sent to Earth by a Celestial called Arishem to hunt the Deviants, predators that menace humanity. The Guardian describes the creatures as part lizard, part rage, part high-tensile cable, and that is exactly how they come across: monsters with no personality beyond the damage they do. By 1521 the job is finished, and the Eternals spend the next five centuries waiting for orders and keeping out of human affairs. In the present day Sersi lives in London with Sprite and dates a human, Dane Whitman, played by Kit Harington. A Deviant attacks, Ikaris arrives, and the team has to be gathered again, beginning with their leader Ajak, who turns out to be dead. Sersi is named her successor and learns that the mission was never what they were told: Earth is being prepared for the birth of a new Celestial.

Ten heroes in one film is the problem, and IGN puts it well: imagine making the first Avengers with no prior introduction to the team. IGN thinks Zhao rises to it, giving a good grasp of each character’s temperament and motivation without much story bloat. Roger Ebert’s site reaches the opposite conclusion, finding the film rushed and unsatisfying because the cast is so large and so much world-building has to happen. I side with the second reading more often than the first. Everyone gets a note to play, and few get more than one. According to IGN, the film even jokes a couple of times that this group was the original Avengers, which only reminds you how much room the other team had to itself.

The emotional spine is Sersi and Ikaris, and it is also where the film is most exposed. Screen Rant calls the romance genuinely sweet, if rushed, and points out that a montage does most of the work, including a marriage scene followed shortly by the MCU’s first sex scene. That is a lot to ask of a montage. By the time the two meet again in the present, with the relationship over, the film wants you to feel the loss of something you were shown for a few minutes. Screen Rant still argues that the tragedy of that failed romance gives Eternals much of its heart, and I would not go that far. I would say it gives the film its only steady pulse. The Guardian names Gemma Chan’s empathetic Sersi as the centre of the story, and Chan carries the warmth, while Richard Madden‘s Ikaris, the most powerful of the group, has to supply the pain.

Around them, the casting does more than the script. Salma Hayek leads as Ajak and Angelina Jolie plays Thena, the most accomplished warrior of the ten. Kumail Nanjiani, in The Guardian’s words, is hammy fun as Kingo, who hides on Earth inside a multi-generational Bollywood acting dynasty and insists on saving the planet with his valet in tow. The cast includes the deaf actor Lauren Ridloff as Makkari and Brian Tyree Henry as Phastos, whom The Guardian calls Marvel’s first openly gay superhero. IGN calls it the most diverse cast in Marvel Studios history. The Guardian grants the effort and then undercuts it: the storytelling, with its forced flashbacks and synthetic sentiment, lets the whole thing down. Representation in the casting is only worth so much when the writing gives these characters so little time to be people.

Time is also the trouble with the scenery. Zhao is known for huge, sweeping landscapes, and IGN admits they are lovely. At a running time of 2 hours and 37 minutes, though, the same review finds that breathtaking but time-consuming nature shots start to feel like a chore. IGN also spots a deeper flaw in the immortal premise: grave sins are committed throughout the story and are quickly forgiven and forgotten. The reviewer reads this as the script’s way of saying that a grudge gets boring after several centuries alive. Maybe so, but the effect on screen is that the internal conflict between the Eternals carries less emotional weight than the story needs.

The Hollywood Reporter makes the most useful distinction. It finds the film often more alive in its quieter moments, in the attention to character, group dynamics and emotional texture, than in its fairly routine CG clashes. It also finds the storytelling choppy, with the depth of feeling only partly compensating. The same review notes how often the Eternals refer to the chaos Thanos caused and wonder who will lead the Avengers now. These are the obligations of a shared universe. A film that wants to sit with its characters keeps being pulled away to explain how it fits into someone else’s story.

The production history explains some of this tension. Zhao was given real creative freedom: she rewrote the script, took particular inspiration from Terrence Malick, and used more locations and more natural light than earlier MCU films. Principal photography ran from July 2019 to February 2020 at Pinewood Studios and on location in England and the Canary Islands. Ramin Djawadi composed the score. You can see an attempt at a different kind of Marvel picture, one that treats the cosmic and the human as parts of the same canvas. You can also see the system around her pulling it back toward the house style.

The verdict from the wider world was split. The film grossed $402.1 million worldwide and became the first MCU release not to receive generally positive reviews, with the screenplay and the pacing drawing the heaviest criticism. Its themes and visuals got some praise. The Hollywood Reporter’s bottom line was that this is a more soulful take on a familiar Marvel formula, and I mostly share that view. What works is small: the quiet exchanges between Sersi and the people she loves, Nanjiani’s vanity, a landscape held a moment too long because Zhao cannot help herself. What does not work is large: the exposition, the Avengers cross-references and the CG fights. Eternals is a film worth arguing with, and that is more than most of its neighbours in the franchise can claim.