In Eternals, the MCU’s concerns shift from 9/11 to climate change

It is one of the most amazing things about Eternals, Chloé Zhao’s Marvel Cinematic Universe epic about a race of heroic immortals, is how uninterested Zhao is in big fights. The film’s superhuman conflicts feel disjointed, as if another movie was trying to get in. That’s unfortunate, because the physical conflict in EternalsIt is deeply embedded in something completely different for Marvel Cinematic Universe. It’s a trend that’s been slowly working its way into our biggest blockbusters, because it’s become impossible to ignore in our daily life: climate change.

[Ed. note: Significant spoilers for Eternals follow.]

Eternals’ plot kicks into gear when its eponymous heroes discover that the Deviants — their bestial counterparts, which the cosmic beings known as Celestials sent the Eternals to Earth to eradicate — have seemingly returned from extinction. It’s eventually revealed that the new Deviants plaguing the world likely returned due to melting polar ice caps — a few stragglers once frozen in the ice have now been freed.

This is a passing detail that the plot doesn’t make much of, but juxtaposed with Zhao’s deep interest in her long-lived characters’ relationship with the natural world, it feels significant. As empires and time change the Earth, so do civilizations. The Eternals are there to watch them fall and rise. But in the film’s present, they are brought out of hiding by the changes only they can live long enough to see in their entirety. Planet Earth is currently in crisis. One human being is directly responsible and admits it openly, but does not do enough to stop it.

This notion is reduced to subtext in the film. Zhao instead chooses to foreground the Eternals’ moral struggle with their mandate of non-interventionism, and the tensions between them over their ultimate mission. But the movie’s final battle tugs at the theme one more time. The Deviant threat was abruptly abandoned. Eternals pivots to a final conflict where its heroes must prevent what’s effectively a natural disaster. The Celestial Tamut’s birthing ground is Earth. Therefore, the Eternals have to unite in an effort stop this god from rising from the Indian Ocean and destroying the entire world.

Image: Marvel Studios

Tiamut’s attempted birth is the most stunning sequence in the film — less a fight scene, and more a physical struggle against cosmic awe. Stopping Tiamut’s birth feels like a watershed moment for the MCU, one that charts a way out of its overly familiar obsessions into something more relevant.

Marvel Cinematic Universe has a lot of superhuman conflict. These conflicts can lead to dad/son fights, or revisionist fantasies about 9/11. Surrogate fathers and real parents can make up the parental stories: Thor, Odin, Tony Stark, Obadiah Stark, Shang Chi and Wenwu and Peter Quill. Peter Parker’s misguided efforts to find a father figure often lead to conflict.

Meanwhile, the MCU’s biggest battles are often disaster cosplay, using the imagery of the 9/11 terrorist attacks as a sort of visual lingua franca to establish its heroes as sufficiently heroic. Events of the first Avengers films are canonically referred to as “The Battle of New York.” The second AvengersSpends considerable time helping civilians, while a fictional Eastern European country faces destruction. You can see the Potomac river changing locations. The Winter Soldier To the Hong Kong final of Doctor Strange However These films show one of the most horrific American collective experiences. They also imagine what it would be like if there was a way to end it. However, 2001 is 20 years old, so the current global struggle for survival may be very different.

Marvel Studios/Disney

This isn’t meant to praise one of the biggest corporations on the planet for finally acknowledging a painfully obvious fact of life — the way we’re expected to when they acknowledge gay people exist, for example. Marvel Studios’ success is arguably the result of a carefully applied conservatism, one that lets directors and individual production teams inch forward into enough new territory with every movie to let the stories feel distinct, while holding them to a strict house style, so all the movies are consistently palatable. MCU movies are like potato chips, in that they share many of the same characteristics as potatoes. However, MCU films have a unique crunch and just enough salt.

Because of Marvel’s relatively safe playbook, the MCU isn’t blazing a trail by turning toward real existential threats to bolster its fantasy villain threats. Climate change has been on big-budget filmmakers’ minds for decades, in all kinds of films: WALL-E, Tomorrow is Tomorrow, The Core, Snowpiercer — the list is wide and varied. Lately, however, the spectre of climate change has been ramping up, until it’s less of a ghost and more of a monster lumbering toward us, making inroads in cerebral sci-fi films like Annihilation Big, absurd effects bonuses like Godzilla, King of MonstersBlockbusters of great quality (Mad Max Fury RoadOther people who are less organized (Remembering). It’s part of the speculative-fiction toolset: part of the value in genre fiction comes from imagining humanity’s many possible ends, and looking for warnings or possible reprieves. Right now, the one-threat is clear.

Even though the reception has been uneven, Eternals, the film’s The most important contribution of the Marvel Cinematic Universe to this world is the way it challenges the status quo under which it arrives. It is filled with ideas about God, our debts to the planet, and moral choices that transcend a single life. Ironically, viewers are left with the same question that MCU fans have: “What impact will this movie make?” EternalsWhat are your thoughts on the future movies? Is the MCU going to post?EternalsOne where characters actually have sex and are openly gay, while also grappling with the question of how to save our planet. Will this movie be, for want of a better word, a departure?