10 IMMORTAL HEROES 7,000 YEARS ONE OSCARWINNING DIRECTOR MARVEL’S BOLDEST MOVIE YET
THE NEXT MOVIE IN MARVEL’S PHASE 4, ETERNALS IS SET TO BE MARVEL’S BIGGEST SWING YET. COMBINING MILLENNIA-SPANNING SWEEP WITH INDIE SENSIBILITIES AND ONE OF THE MOST EXCITING ENSEMBLES YET ASSEMBLED FOR A SUPERHERO FILM, CHLOÉ ZHAO’S SUPER-FAMILY EPIC COULD CHANGE THE COMIC-BOOK MOVIE LANDSCAPE FOREVER.
‘IF THERE’S A LEAD IN THIS ENSEMBLE, IT IS SERSI, IT IS GEMMA CHAN’ KEVIN FEIGE
Since
Jon Favreau helmed Iron Man in 2008, Marvel Studios has been fearless in hiring directors not typically associated with blockbusters. Kenneth Branagh, Shane Black and Taika Waititi are just a few of the names you wouldn’t have previously considered for big-budget capes-and-spandex adventures. The latest pleasant surprise in the fold is Chloé Zhao, the Chinese filmmaker known thus far for Songs My Brothers Taught Me, The Rider and Nomadland, the latter earning her Best Director and Best Picture Oscars (among countless other accolades). It makes her the first Best Director Oscar-winner behind an MCU movie, even though her pitch was made just before she hit the road with Frances McDormand.
“I actually pitched Eternals to Kevin [Feige, Marvel Studios President] and Nate [Moore, Vice President of Production and Development] the day before I got into my van and drove to do Nomadland,” Zhao tells Total Film with a laugh. “I remember, as I was leaving, Victoria [Alonso, Executive Vice President of Production] said, ‘Make sure you come back. It’s going to be a long journey.’ I drove away the next morning to the desert.”
Her filmography might mark Zhao out as an unusual choice, given that her films have been defiantly character-driven, naturalistic, intimate affairs, but this garlanded filmmaker is also a proud genre geek. Growing up in China, she didn’t have access to Hollywood movies until her teens (True Lies is the first US movie she remembers seeing). “Earlier on, it was a lot of anime and manga, and also the Chinese wuxia genre of TV shows and things like that,” she recalls. “But my early exposure was definitely like Star Wars and James Cameron’s movies.” Zhao made sure the word got out via her agent that she’d love to do a Marvel Studios movie.
When she did end up getting a meeting, Zhao gravitated towards Eternals, despite not knowing the source material. “I was not familiar with them,” she laughs. “I think not a lot of people are familiar with them.” But she saw something there. “I loved the idea that it’s an ensemble film,” Zhao continues. “And it is a film that allowed me to really explore a lot of the inner struggles and questions that I have about us as human beings, and our place in the universe, and our purpose, and things like identity. When I read the treatment for Eternals, I thought, ‘What an incredible way to explore that in an allegorical and fantastical way,’ which is the type of storytelling that really excites me.”
The scope of Eternals also held its own geeky appeal. “To be a fan of the MCU, and to be able to go back in time to sort of explore the mythology and history of the MCU as a fan, was definitely a treat,” she adds. Ever since casting Robert Downey Jr. as a second-tier superhero back in 2008, Marvel Studios hasn’t been afraid of a hard sell, going on to make heroes of a Norse god, a goateed sorcerer and a trisyllabic space tree. But the title characters in Eternals represent the biggest swing the studio has yet taken with its heroes…
PROTECT AND SERVE
As Zhao sums up the premise, “They’re a group of immortal aliens, really. They came from outer space, they were sent here by the Celestials 7,000 years ago to come and protect humans from the Deviants. We’re going to see this group of people, this family of 10, throughout history, and how they are affected by that experience. They have one more very important mission to do.” Got that? The Celestials are an ancient race outdating most other lifeforms. As seen in the trailer, they’re imposing mechanical-looking giants with glowing red eyes. The Deviants, meanwhile, are monstrous creatures in various beastly forms. Seems they’ve been pretty quiet, for long enough at least for the Eternals to drift apart.
However, when Tony Stark reversed Thanos’ blip and brought back the half of the population that had been wiped