(HI! Welcome to Caterpillar Steps, a newsletter by the writer and photographer Corbin Smith. I doubt I will employ subscriptions here, but if you like the newsletter and want to buy me a treat, you can feel free to deposit some cheddar in my Venmo account, @BigCorbs. Please share with your friends and family if you are so inclined. This week, I am going to write about two movies I saw last night.)
I’ve come to consume Marvel Cinematic Universe products the way I do episodes of Star Trek.
ONE: It doesn’t really matter how GOOD a particular episode is: I’ll still watch that garbage and be emotionally satiated for however long it's on.
TWO: How engaging a particular entry ends up being is a direct result of how compelling the character and actor at the center of it is. They always hit similar beats, but the performances make the energy that does or doesn’t drive them into something ecstatic.
So we arrive at “The Eternals,” a real Ensign-Kim-Episode-ass entry of Earth’s favorite monocultural Big Screen Anthology TV Show. A decisively second tier Jack “King” Kirby creation, The Eternals are some aliens who were sent to Earth like a gazillion years ago at the behest of some cool looking space monster men called the Celestials. Over the years, their adventures capture the imaginations of various historical peoples, who make them the basis for all of our myths. Ikarus can fly… like Icarus. Prometheus shares technology with them… like the fire guy. Thena is a warrior lady… like A-Thena, the goddess of war. Kirby was a genius, one of the greatest artists in the history of the medium superhero-or-not, but he really didn’t give it his all on this one. But, unfortunately, Marvel blew their Inhumans load on a TV Show everyone hated, and they’re already fucking with like, Shang-Chi (Sick movie, cool actors, fun dragon), so these MythPeople would have to do.
(I intend to play fast and loose with spoilers from here on out. Don’t worry, the movie isn't good enough to really care.)
The first half of this movie SUCKS. It’s BOOOOOORRRIIIINNNNGGGGG. It goes back and forth between the Eternals’ adventures through history (Nearly all dull-- there’s a part where they watch the destruction of the Aztecs that’s sort of provocative, a kind of pop culture ass Problem With Evil in miniature but otherwise totally dull) and their getting the band back together hijynx because, folks… the Deviants are back. The Deviants are wiry space tigers The Eternals are supposed to fight. Honestly in retrospect I am feeling more generous to their presence, because the movie rides on a twist that makes what they ACTUALLY are a little more interesting. But when you’re watching it in the moment, you’re like what the fuck is this shit, why am I watching a fake Superman fight Big Cats made out of piles of tangled cords?
The flashbacks are boring, but even MORE boring are the modern day parts. This is a movie where the disappearance of Jon Snow from the narrative creates a charisma gap that no one on screen is equipped to fill. The action pivots around Sersi (Weird to have not one but TWO Game of Thrones stars saying “CERSI’ over and over but I guess we don’t get to pick names when everything is an adaptation.), played by Gemma Chan. In the Comics, Sersi (Above) is a fuckin’ Party Animal who does transmutation for fun, but here she is a cultural anthropologist who does to help people. Responsible transmutation. Really dull.
She is joined in dullness by Sprite, who is a child illusionist who hates that she is a forever child, and Ikarus, who is the flying into the sun guy and is also Robb Stark. Ikarus and Sersi used to fuck (we see them fuck on the beach a little, which has never happened in a Marvel Movie before. Congrats to Marvel on discovering sex I guess.) but they stopped 500 years ago for mysterious reasons. Now, Sersi is fuckin’ Jon Snow because she has a type.
This is reading entirely too much like a blog recap from 15 years ago, so I will divest from this plot explanation. The problem with the first half of this movie is that NONE of the first few characters we are saddled with are even remotely interesting, and they are being brought to life by actors who are turning in solely professional takes on their characters strolling from plot point to plot point. It just lies there, waiting for someone interesting to come by and spice this thing up. The movie THINKS that someone is Kumail, who shows up right after they find out their leader got murked by a wire-tiger, but I don’t like Kumail very much. I have been told that normal people like Kumail more than me. I brought too much Kumail related baggage into this. That’s on me. I’m sorry, movie. Please forgive me, so I can see Spider-Man later this year. (If you don’t like a Marvel movie, they don’t let you see the next one. I don’t make the rules.)
The movie picks up a little when Barry Keoghan and Brian Tyree Henry show up (Fun to watch!), and then transforms into something genuinely watchable when it turns out that (SPOILERS) the Eternals, unbeknownst to them, aren’t shepherding human beings to the future for the fun of it, but because our COLLECTIVE THOUGHT ENERGY feeds THE CELESTIAL EGG IN THE EARTHS CORE and that Ikarus killed their leader when she suggested that maybe they should stop the celestial from hatching. It’s at this point that Madsen, who has been playing a default superhero, shifts into a malevolent mode, which he is much better at. We see this guy shove Salma Hayek into a pit of wire tigers, folks! Really mean stuff!
Anyway the Eternals succeed in stopping the egg from hatching and killing everyone because Ikarus can’t bring himself to kill Cersi because he wuvs her. Then, I shit you not, he FLIES INTO THE SUN and DIES. Everyone in my theater yelled “GODDAMN THIS IS A LITTLE ON THE NOSE, HUH” and threw Red Vines at the screen. Then there’s like 20 minutes worth of sitcom-style wrap up shit which honestly I usually like in Marvel stuff (EXCEPTION: when they fix the boat in the Winter Soldier show) but considering the characters in this one were dull and I was tired of spending time with them, I got a little watch looky.
As I said, these kind of light Marvel Movie things live or die on if you can buy into the characters and the actors. In Guardians of the Galaxy, for instance, another team-up thing, Pratt plays a fucking moron to the hilt while hanging out with a tree man and a wicked cool green lady, which is enough to keep you engaged. Eternals sets Gemma Chan in the middle of and DEMANDS she not do ANYTHING interesting WHATSOEVER for TWO AND A HALF HOURS.
One more thing: Angelina Jolie plays a mega powerful lady who is slowly going crazy. Good device, but I’m not quite sure Jolie is at a phase in a career where she is looking to bring truly insane energy to anything. It’s the movie in miniature: just not weird or wild enough, pivoting around actors who are walking on a series of straight lines. I still watched it though, because I’m a little pig boy.
The first half of my Eternals Double Feature was spent watching SPENCER, a new movie about Princess Diana attending royal Christmas celebrations in 1991, right as the public was finding out about Prince Charles’ ongoing affair with his current wife, Camila Parker-Bowels. While I was in the shower this morning, I tried to figure out if this movie had anything in common with The Eternals. Here is the best I could think of: they both employ more muted, pastelish color palettes. It looks awesome in Spencer, and a little dull in The Eternals. (Semi-related: The Eternals has a night scene where you can see ISO Noise in the darkness: not something I thought I would be picking out in movies that usually prioritize solid colors.)
No, Spencer is not about stopping the end of the world. It’s about someone having a protracted anxiety episode, and in this it is terribly convincing. Kristen Stewart, one of our FINEST ACTRESSES (Check her out in Clouds of Sils Maria if you want to see one of the most naturalistic film performances on record.) plays Diana, trapped in a series of embarrassing and stressful rituals she is forced to undertake in order to see her children and keep the press from wildly speculating about her crumbling personal life.
At the same time, she is experiencing bulimia nervosa, a disorder the movie viscerally illustrates in a series of deeply unnerving scenes of eating and purging, dealing with suicidal thoughts, and just generally suffocating in a world of structural madness that seem engineered to break her spirit in any way it possibly can. One of these rituals, a real one, involves placing Diana on an old timey scale to make sure she eats three pounds of food over the course of the weekend’s festivities. This would be a fucking NIGHTMARE for a someone with buimia. She also finds herself obsessing over and seeing the ghost of Anne Boylen, Henry the Eighth’s second wife, who was killed so he could marry someone else.
Stewart, you’ve probably heard, is wonderful, inhabiting Diana’s natural poise and the horrors of an anxiety meltdown in equal measure. A movie that is just about this performance is worth it in and of itself. But when my thinking about the movie steps out of that frame, I find it hard not to wonder… what is this thing about? Considering the action of the movie is purely speculative, it doesn’t work as a straight biopic of Diana, not that anyone really needed one. There is a title card at the top of the movie that claims it is a “Fable based on a real tragedy.” But like… what’s the fable? What’s the moral of the story, exactly?
THE TERROR OF FAMILY AND THE IDIOCY OF TRADITION: All the action in the movie happens in a sweltering panopticon where gossip spreads like wildfire. The kitchen, where the movie starts, has a sign for the staff that reads BE QUIET: THEY CAN HEAR YOU. Don’t be mistaken: this right here is a Foucaultian take on Princess Diana. Her privacy is violated at every turn, her attachment to a particular chambermaid (Sally Hawkings, baby!) dismissed and used against her, the family OBSESSES over making sure she closes her curtains. She buys her kids stuffed animals to open on Christmas day, in defiance of Royal Tradition, which calls for them to be opened at night. It’s a stack of arbitrary nonsense, a tiny surveillance state designed to uphold… what, exactly? The sanctity of the royal family? The same sanctity that Charles is presently disregarding, and that Henry the Eighth disregarded when he killed two of his wives? In viewing the structures of an extravagant holiday for rich people, do the structures that ALL of us submit to during the holidays seem more absurd in and of themselves? Or…
THE ROYAL FAMILY IN PARTICULAR: …are we just seeing and dissecting this particular set of absurdist traditions? Over the last few years, the British screenwriter Peter Morgan has lorded over a one man crusade to produce as much filmed content about the 20th Century Royal family as possible, content that is devoured by Netflix munchers who are all too willing to temporarily forget that these fucking people are a giant waste of money, living in buildings that should be museums, cosplaying a grand imperial tradition that was built on the corpses of brown people all over the world. Spencer, is a grand rebuttal to this romance, a recontextualization of these people as the purveyors and maintainers of a big dumb expensive play that smashes anyone who has any inclination to modern thought right into the fucking carpet. These people Diana has been tricked into familiar relations with are living in a coloured Marienbad, and she is exploding under the pressure.
ALL SOCIETY, ALL WOMEN: Of course, it could just be a regular ol’ feminist parable, about how the world itself conspires to make women insane through social and aesthetic pressure. The sheer number of outfits that Diana is forced into, the feminine roles she is made to inhabit in so many precise ways, well… look man it’s just not a long walk to everyone else, you know?
Writing about this movie has made me like it a little more. Check it out! As for The Eternals, if you are cursed to see it, you probably will.