Marvel’s Eternals (which recently got a slight title tweak from The Eternals) is something of a mystery. Outside of a few leaked set photos, we haven’t seen a single second of footage from the movie, no trailer or even a tease yet. We don’t know much about the story, other than that it will pit the Eternals, an ancient race of alien beings, against their ancient enemy, the Deviants, and that it will involve one of the Eternals falling in love with a human. Heck, we’ve barely even seen any concept art.
Still, that’s not stopping Eternals from being one of the most anticipated movies of the next few years. And after director Chloe Zhao’s recent interview with THR, we’re even more excited; Eternals sounds like one of the weirdest and most unique Marvel movies yet.
First off, you have to know that everything we see in Eternals is exactly what Zhao wanted us to see.
“I shot exactly the way I wanted to shoot. On location. A lot of magic hour. Three-hundred-sixty degrees on the same camera as I did on Nomadland. Same rigs. It’s a bit surreal. I’m still waiting for the shoe to drop. It hasn’t. I think I got lucky in that Marvel wants to take risks and do something different.”
The Nomadland she mentioned is her other movie, a small-budget Searchlight film that stars Frances McDormand as a woman in her 60s who goes on a journey through the American West as a nomad after losing everything in the Great Recession. That’s it. Just Frances McDormand in a van for a few months. And this is the exact same setup that Zhao used to shoot Marvel’s huge, big-budget Eternals. Excellent thing #1.
Excellent thing #2: Chloe Zhao is somehow incorporating her love of manga into Eternals. “I have such deep, strong, manga roots,” explained Zhao. “I brought some of that into Eternals. And I look forward to pushing more of that marriage of East and West.”
Marvel’s Kevin Feige confirms it was this exact boldness of vision that got Zhao the job. “Her initial pitch to us was fascinating,” he said. “And frankly one of the reasons we moved forward on the movie was because of the vision that she brought to it.” Part of that vision being the highly stylized visuals of manga and anime.
And excellent thing #3: There’s a giant Bollywood dance number in Eternals. We have no idea why right now. But there is.
Seriously, the giant dance sequence incorporates some 50 dancers. Kumail Nanjiani, the first Pakistani-American Marvel superhero (and also a Bollywood star himself), could not be more excited by or grateful for the scene. “When I walked onto the set and saw a huge group of brown people who were going to be in a Marvel movie,” he explained, “I felt such gratitude towards Chloé for creating the situation. The scene was full of joy.”
And that’s exactly what Zhao was aiming for with her multicultural, purposely misfit gang of superheroes, she said:
“I wanted it to reflect the world we live in. But also I wanted to put a cast together that feels like a group of misfits. I didn’t want the jocks. I want you to walk away at the end of the movie not thinking, ‘This person is this ethnicity, that person is that nationality.’ No. I want you to walk away thinking, ‘That’s a family.’ You don’t think about what they represent. You see them as individuals.”
Excellent thing #4.
Zhao is currently deep into post-production on Eternals and we’re hoping her vision ends up being as fun and bold as it sounds.
Eternals is in theaters on February 12, 2021.
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