ETERNALS: Live and Let Die

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Director: Chloé Zhao

Writers: Chloé Zhao, Patrick Burleigh, Ryan Firpo, Kaz Firpo

Cast: Gemma Chan, Richard Madden, Angelina Jolie, Salma Hayek, Kit Harington, Kumail Nanjiani, Lia McHugh, Brian Tyree Henry, Lauren Ridloff, Barry Keoghan, Ma Dong-seok, Harish Patel, Bill Skarsgård

Runtime: 156 mins.

2021

The marketing is sweaty to insist that this is Marvel's Eternals, and with good reason; the 26th film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe adapts material less familiar to the general audience than anything that came before. The source for Chloé Zhao's movie is a Jack Kirby experiment in vibrant, phantasmagorical cosmic comic imagery meant to tickle our thirst for the incomprehensible. The movie is incomprehensible in a more pedestrian way. The greatest loss between original and adaptation is the otherworldly imagery, which has been replaced by sunwashed wastelands and underlit forests.

Thank the multiple gods for Arishem, the singular blast of successful imagery in the film. Arishem is a Celestial, an elder god that maintains the glue of the universe. He is a sort of dispatcher for the Eternals, humanoid immortals who occupy developing planets and do battle with the nasty nasty Deviants (which look like tentacle dogs or whatever). Whenever the Eternals are speaking with Arishem, the physical world peels away as if tissue paper, revealing an enormous cherry red being too immense to visualize all at once. Whenever the Eternals aren't speaking with Arishem, they tend to be sitting around doing not much of anything or maybe watching a war happen. Their spokesperson contacts Arishem at semi-random intervals. Eventually, around two hours in, Arishem uses a Powerpoint Presentation to unveil the basic stakes. This is the plot.

HALLOWEEN III: SEASON OF THE WITCH - Shapeless

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Director: Tommy Lee Wallace
Writer: Tommy Lee Wallace
Cast: Tom Atkins, Stacey Nelkin, Dan O'Herlihy
Runtime: 98 mins.
1982

The opening sequence of Tommy Lee Wallace's Halloween III is auspicious enough. A bedraggled man flees from unknown pursuers into a junkyard. His peril is punctuated by a barbed synthetic score composed by Alan Howarth and John Carpenter himself. (The score, one of the finest aspects of the film, is the only creative contribution of series progenitor Carpenter.) Then the first death happens. A besuited villain gets crushed by a slow rolling car; his body goes herkyjerk for a second, then limp. It's an embarrassingly awkward moment, foreshadowing many more fun special effects to come that are framed in such a way as to suck that fun right out.

To be fair, subsequent plot developments recontextualize the stiltedness of that death, but not in a way that improves things.

You see, the fleeing man's attending doctor and attending daughter can't shake the sense that something is very wrong after he gets his skull crushed while sedated in a hospital bed. They team up to navigate a hapless concoction of a plot that more or less goes as follows... in an Irish company town (?) there exists the Silver Shamrock factory, a producer of children's Halloween masks. Head of company Conal Cochran has made it his ghoul* to sell as many masks as possible, which are hugely popular despite being offered in only three varieties: Pumpkin, Skeleton, and Witch (??). The twist is, these masks are equipped with an electronic chip (???) that shoots lasers into children's heads (????) when triggered by a special Halloween night advertisement that apparently kids are really excited about watching (?????). This laser beam turns the maskwearer's insides into poisonous snakes and bugs (??????). Conal has accomplished this by stealing one of the Stonehenge stones (???????) and using its power to bolster ancient druidic and planetary alignment energies (????????). He does all this with the help of a small army of human-passing automatons, which he just sort of had already (?????????).

*This was actually a typo but it seemed fitting.