CAST: SALMA HAYEK, HARRY STYLES. ANGELINA JOLIE, KIT HARRINGTON, KUMAIL NANJIANI, GEMMA CHAN, RICHARD MADDEN

DIRECTOR : CHLOE ZHAO 

BLUF

The Eternals broke up and now must get their OG band back together. This is because of “global earthquakes” and the reemergence of the baddies Deviants, who are back from the dead with the vengeance of cosmic proportions. What follows is an armageddon so tortuous that if every Bollywood villain formed one massive conglomerate soul to wreak havoc with all the heroes and kidnap all heroines, its jaw would open awe and wonder.

THE MEAT AND THE POTATOES

There are outer space Godly creatures with proper-noun titles who hire some immortal outer space crusaders called Eternals to protect non-outer space peeps from outer space monsters named Deviants.

5000 B.C in Mesopotamia, the Eternals vanquish some Deviants standing confidently and magnificently in the trademark Superhero symmetric wedge formation to celebrate the win and feel good about themselves.

Ajak (Hayak) is the leader of the group and is the official communication superhero between the Celestials and the Eternals. Some Eternals are powerful badasses, like Sersi (Gemma Chan), who can convert things into different things (Wiki defines it as the “psionic ability to rearrange the molecular structure of objects”- it’s a real thing); Ikaris (Richard Madden), who, with his shattering eye beams and ability to fly, is basically Superman, yet he is not Superman; or Thena, who is drop-dead gorg Angelina Jolie who just has to turn up and look herself to look like a stunning warrior goddess. The other Eternals sorta got zuckerpunched when they were handing out powers, like for instance Gilgamesh (Ma Dong-Seok), a basic strongman with glowing unearthly outer space fist-gloves; Phastos (Brian Tyree Henry), a normal silicon valleyish inventor of technology; or Kingo (Kumail Nanjiani), who shoots laser zaps from his fingers, dances pretty to Bollywood tunes with dolled up pretty brown girls and guys and who has a cameraman called Patel ( yes, yes had to be). Three Eternals have powers of a more tenuous, theoretically unsafe sort: Sprite (Lia McHugh) who can create fantasies, Makkari (Lauren Ridloff) can sprint like Flash, and Drug (Barry Keoghan) who can (gulp)mass-control minds.

IN THE KNOW

It is a project in its own right keeping track of all these characters within multiple settings as the movie jumps from one far-flung Computer-generated locale to another, and from past to present to far past to near-present like a very high college kid. Need a mind map? We do too. But if you have been watching Hindi serials with huge joint families and toxic relationships between them – use that skill now.

A Chloe Zhao movie without quiet scenes in South Dakota is not a Chloe Zhao movie at all.

WHAT WE LOVED

The formation

WHAT WE MISSED

A disaster from Marvel