In a few months, Marvel’s 2021 flick Eternals will celebrate its fifth anniversary. One of its big selling points back then was director Chloé Zhao, fresh off her Oscar win for Nomadland and who talked up her desire to make a big movie with real sets and a more thoughtful vibe.
Critics and audiences didn’t really gel with it back then, but hasn’t killed Zhao’s affection for the medium. At the Venice Film Festival, she called making the film “a dream come true,” and likened western comics like the Big Two and others to manga. As someone who grew up wanting to be a mangaka, but couldn’t draw, Zhao has always wanted to tell stories, and she thinks all forms of it, even ones to popularly dunk on, have value.
“The purpose of storytelling for me, is to create containers for people … to try to process what they need to process,” she explained. “Archetypes are such a great way to do it—and we see them in myths—because it’s something we all share. I do feel it’s important not to write off stories because we don’t consider them high art.” And to those that’ve used Eternals to contrast against Nomadland, that’s something she’s not here for, as she jokingly said both films are about “people in nature who have complicated relationships with them.”
To Zhao’s credit, Eternals did try to be something like high art for superhero movies and while it didn’t fully take, it’s still got its fans. Remembered more as a flawed one-off, maybe there’ll be a day someone tries to do what it does and take an ambitious swing—after all, you can get great things by building on less successful attempts.
[via Variety]
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