Eternals (2021, Chloé Zhao)

The nice thing about Eternals is the film’s most damaging element is obvious. Richard Madden is terrible. He’s not the lead—when Eternals has a lead, it’s Gemma Chan—but he’s top gun, so he gets a lot of screen time. And he’s terrible. What’s even funnier about Madden being terrible is the film leans into him being a “Game of Thrones” star. He’s got a love triangle with fellow “Game of Thrones” star Kit Harington, who’s ostensibly in the movie but really just for a handful of cameos.

Harington is Chan’s adorable British boyfriend. Madden is her Scottish-accented alien super-being ex-husband. It’s a big flex when Harington and Madden face-off, and it’s clear not just Harington’s much better as a movie star than Madden, but Madden sucks the life out of scenes. He might be playing a Superman riff, but it’s an energy vampire Superman. He makes scenes worse. On the one hand, director Zhao can’t do anything with the performance, which has all the screen charisma of molded bread; on the other, she never compensates for it either.

Eternals rises and falls with Madden.

There are other big problems with the movie. It’s really boring for the first hour and a half. Eternals is solidly into the second act when it finally starts engaging. The film’s got a lot of expository information to dump, and every dump is a bad one. However, it manages to plod even more when it’s doing flashbacks.

The film opens with a “Star Wars but serious” title crawl explaining the Eternals are alien super-beings who live on Earth to protect the people from the “Deviants.” There are giant space entities out there who make galaxies and blah blah blah. Doesn’t matter. The movie figures out how to integrate these beyond enormous entities once in the entire film, and it’s a gimmick shot done well. So, the giant entities don’t matter. The human-shaped super-beings matter.

They show up on Earth in 5000 BCE. Madden immediately thinks Chan is cute; Chan immediately thinks Earth is charming. Salma Hayek is their leader, but she doesn’t really matter because she doesn’t have good fight scene powers. She’s a healer. Angelina Jolie’s the warrior one. Jolie gives the most amusing performance because she seems to get it more than anyone else. She’s stifling a smirk but still sincere when it counts.

Like when she’s hanging out with best bro Ma Dong-seok. He’s another warrior, the one with the big heart. Ma’s good. He doesn’t have good comic timing—in English, he’s always had it in Korean–but neither does Zhao, so it doesn’t matter.

The other Eternals are Kumail Nanjiani (laser fingers), Lia McHugh (illusion), Brian Tyree Henry (wills technology into existence), Lauren Ridloff (the speedster), and Barry Keoghan (the telepath). We meet them in the past, and then the film reintroduces them in the present when they’ve adjusted to regular human life. Albeit immortal regular human life.

Nanjiani gets the biggest story; he’s a Bollywood star with an amusing videographer sidekick, Harish Patel. McHugh is forever an awkward tween girl with an impossible crush. Yawn. Henry is a family man trying to put immortal meddling behind him. He’s gay, an MCU first, and it’s okay, but he’s most charming with the family, and they rush through having the family around. Ridloff and Keoghan just kind of come into the narrative as needed, even though they’ve got more charm than anyone else. It’s particularly impressive because Keoghan’s character is a twerp.

Bill Skarsgård plays the villain, an evolving man-beast. “Plays” meaning does the voice performance presumably some of the CGI modeling. The character eventually looks something like the monster from The Keep, which doesn’t seem intentional. Why recall one disaster in another.

There are some nearly neat 2001 references but then not really.

It’s unclear if fixing Eternals’s obvious problems would do any significant good. Besides Madden’s entire casting, there’s Chan’s lack of a protagonist arc, the momentum-killing flashbacks, Ramin Djawadi’s weak sauce epic movie score (just give up and hire Hans Zimmer for a Hans Zimmer score), and the awkward superhero references. Not just to the Marvel movies before it, but also to DC superheroes. Because world-building?

It also doesn’t help one of the credits snippets promise a far more amusing sequel, which has a cameo with great promise.

Zhao’s direction is fine. It’s often good. It’s never not fine. Ben Davis’s photography’s solid. There are a handful of composite shots where the foreground doesn’t match the CGI background, but it could be worse. Dylan Tichenor and Craig Wood’s editing’s good. Sammy Sheldon’s costumes. They’re all right.

Eternals could be worse. Madden could be in it a second longer. And it might never be good, but it also could’ve been better. Score alone. Get someone who could do Madden’s acting for him with the music. Whatever. And it could also be a second shorter overall. Any shorter would help.

Eternals is never really disappointing or even frustrating, just inconceivably tedious.

But, if they deliver on the mid-credits promise, the next one should be a blast.

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018, Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey, and Rodney Rothman)

Like most superhero origin stories, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse suffers from some third-act problems. It doesn’t just have a lengthy final fight scene between new Spider-Man (voiced by Shameik Moore) and Kingpin (Liev Schreiber in maybe the film’s only pointless voice casting), it’s got some inherently reduced stakes being an animated movie with a PG rating (i.e., it’s doubtful Moore’s going to die), but also no particular animus between Moore and Schreiber. The film starts with Schreiber disposing of the original Spider-Man (Chris Pine) while Moore watches. Pine isn’t in it long enough to make an impact, but he also isn’t in it so much he’s clearly not making an impact like Schreiber. Pine’s Peter Parker Spider-Man, Moore’s Miles Morales Spider-Man.

But Moore’s just met Pine, and while they do have a quick banter about Pine training Moore, they don’t have a relationship. Not like Moore and pretty much every other character in the movie, including one who’s got a significant relationship with Schreiber and could have a major third act pay-off… but doesn’t because Schreiber’s unaware of it.

Unlike most superhero origin stories, Spider-Verse can pull out of the tailspin for a nice set of epilogues. It’s a montage setting up Moore as the new Spider-Man, which the movie’s been setting up since a few minutes in, so it saves the day.

Kingpin might just be a bad villain, outside Vincent D’Onofrio anyway. He’s also not the point of the story here. Sure, he’s trying to open a portal to other universes to get back his family, unintentionally ripping the fabric of the multiverse and letting various Spider-People in from alternate dimensions, only for Moore’s universe to reject their cells and slowly destroy them. So while Schreiber’s responsible for the stakes, he’s really got nothing to do with them.

Enough complaining, however, because Spider-Verse is otherwise a joyful, heartbreaking trip through the Spider-Man mythos. Yes, there’s Moore’s journey to taking up the mantle, but there’s also a bunch of other Spider-People who all inform the mythos one way or another. Principally, there’s Jake Johnson as a forty-something loser version of Spider-Man; he’s like the Pine variant gone wrong, which made me assume he did the voice for the first Peter Parker Spider-Man too. Pine’s seriously not in it enough for it to matter. Johnson reluctantly becomes Moore’s mentor and has the best character arc of the Spider-People.

Mainly because no one else has any stakes other than surviving the movie. Johnson’s learned to love the web again thanks to his adventures with Moore. Plus, Johnson’s from a universe where he’s lost people, and they’re still around in this one.

Then there’s Hailee Steinfeld’s Spider-Woman (or Spider-Gwen). She’s the “What If the Spider Bit Gwen Stacy and Not Peter Parker” issue. Steinfeld’s delightful, probably the second-best performance in the film—Moore’s far and away the best—she just doesn’t have any conflict. The film presents short origin stories for all the Spider-People, starting with Pine’s Spider-Man, and Steinfeld’s gives her some gravitas just nowhere to use it. She’s trapped in another universe, nothing else.

Ditto Nicolas Cage’s Spider-Man Noir, who’s a gag turned into an exemplary supporting cast member—he gets played for laughs the entire time—Kimiko Glenn’s Peni Parker (she’s from a manga future), and then John Mulaney’s Peter Porker, the Spectacular Spider-Ham. He’s from a cartoon universe. Except it’s an animated movie where the very fabric of reality is tearing so it’s frequently cartoony even when Mulaney’s not around. Glenn’s sympathetic, Mulaney’s fine, Cage’s fun. But the best of the Spider-Friends outside the central trio (who don’t get to be the central trio for long enough) is Lily Tomlin’s Aunt May. She’s the tech brains behind Spider-Man, and it’s a wonderful turn.

So all those Spider-People need to get home and stop Schreiber from destroying this universe while Moore’s also dealing with family issues. Dad Brian Tyree Henry is pressuring Moore to go to an elite private school, where Moore’s class and race set him apart from the rest of the students. He just wishes he could stay in Brooklyn and hang out with his uncle, played by Mahershala Ali. Mom Luna Lauren Velez is in the movie so little you’d think Christopher Nolan wrote it.

Henry makes it known right off he doesn’t like web-slinging vigilantes, making him the wrong person for Moore to consult about his new spider-powers. Worse, Ali’s got a complicated relationship with Spider-Man, too, cutting Moore off from his family.

The movie tries to play up the family angle at the end, but it doesn’t work. It’s another third act stumble to recover from, and it does.

Great direction and animation—it almost always emphasizes the emotionality of the situations the characters find themselves in, finding the sadness at the core of the Spider-Man character and relating it not just between inter-dimensional Spider-People, but also to the core of regular people. It’s an incredibly thoughtful, deliberate exploration of the character through variants of that character. Like, very cool work from writers Phil Lord and Rodney Rothman. They discover something exceptional in Spider-Verse.

The direction and animation are also crucial. Particularly for the pacing. Spider-Verse gets to speed up and slow down using devices not just from film and animation but also incorporating comic book techniques. The comic book style stuff works out great, which is another reason the busy, neat, action-packed, and dramatic finale still comes up short. It doesn’t fulfill the creative ambitions in the rest of the picture.

Excellent music from Daniel Pemberton and then the soundtrack selections as well. And not just because they use the St. Elmo’s Fire song for some reason; it’s kind of awesome when they do.

Spider-Verse is so one of a kind and wonderful, I’ve forgotten to mention Kathryn Hahn until this point. She’s the scientist who’s trying to unlock the multiverse and turns out to be more tied to the Spider-People than it first appears. She goes from being Schreiber’a seemingly unwitting flunky to being the best villain in the movie. It’s not a particularly high bar, of course, but there’s an excellent surprise runner-up to her before it’s all the way down the hill to Schreiber.

Tombstone shows up for a bit, which is cool, but he’s background more than an actual villain.

Spider-Verse is a fantastic motion picture. Moore, Stenfield, and—to a lesser extent—Johnson create some very special characters. Well, along with the animation team, who do phenomenal work on the performances. The voice acting’s great, but the animators make sure the visuals are equal in caliber. Maybe another reason Schreiber’s Kingpin is so wanting, they don’t give him anywhere near the expressiveness of the rest of the characters.

It’s great. Especially since they’re able to save the end… though the end credits tag is utterly skippable. It’s technically and culturally amusing but too slight after the main action.

Godzilla vs. Kong (2021, Adam Wingard)

Kong vs. Godzilla is a rather bad film. Director Wingard is bad at every single thing the film tasks him with. Kong expert Rebecca Hall and adopted daughter Kaylee Hottle going to the Hollow Earth with pseudo-scientist burn-out Alexander Skarsgård? Terrible. Teens Millie Bobby Brown and Julian Dennison teaming up with kaiju conspiracy podcaster Brian Tyree Henry? Somehow worse. Giant CGI ape fighting giant CGI lizard? Even worse.

Wingard directs the giant monster fight worse than if he were doing a pro-wrestling homage. Wingard does have some homage in vs., just never good. Like when Kong jumps Die Hard-style or knocks his shoulder back in like Lethal Weapon. Or when there’s a Twister reference. The movie’s a smorgasbord of unoriginality, tied together with bad acting—Skarsgård is godawful, but the rest of the main cast is tolerable (Hottle is probably even good under the circumstances and it’s clear Dennison needs to fire his agent and get a better one). The main supporting cast—actually, just the supporting cast, there are only like ten people in the movie, the rest are collateral damage. But gazillionare inventor Demián Bichir? He’s real bad. Eiza González as his merciless daughter? She’s worse.

If Wingard had a sense of humor and tried to do vs. campy, it might work. Even with the terrible acting. But he doesn’t have a sense of humor. However, he’s not overly serious because serious suggests some kind of thoughtful and there’s no thought in the direction. As bad as some of the acting gets and it gets painfully, absurdly bad, Wingard’s clearly responsible for at least twenty-five percent of it. The script’s really bad too, so maybe twenty percent to the script, which means the cast is only like half responsible for their lousy performances.

And some get it worse than others. Like Brown and Henry. The movie’s giving them some very bad material. There’s not really anyway to make gold out of it.

The CGI is good. Nothing Wingard does with the good CGI is good, but the CGI is good. Outside being an eighties action hero, Kong has some personality (he’s pals with Hottle). Godzilla gets none. It’s hilarious they’ve got Godzilla first in the title this time because Godzilla is a very special guest star.

Luckily, Godzilla vs. Kong doesn’t start strong and have a stumble. It starts low and sort of flops around in the mud without ever getting on firm land. In fact, considering the affordable-to-license sixties songs they accompany Kong with because apparently composer Tom Holkenborg can’t handle a full score, it kind of improves. The songs are terrible. Holkenborg at least tries. There are a few moments when Holkenborg manages to find wisps of potential in whatever Wingard’s going. The wisps wisp away, but still. There are a couple almost good narrative beats thanks to Holkenborg.

No one else involved achieves anywhere near as much.

There’s a lot of bad ideas in Godzilla vs. Kong, a lot of silly ideas and a lot of bad ones (not to mention ones they ripped off from Toho’s post-2000s Godzilla movies—and Kong doesn’t get a creator credit, which isn’t cool). But with all obvious ability in the CGI—minus the shots where they have to match with whatever cinematographer Ben Seresin’s shooting with a lot of glare to hide the composite—it should’ve had some spectacle.

It’s not so bad the giant monkey fighting the giant lizard isn’t the most visually engaging material in the movie. But if the acting and writing and directing of the “plot” weren’t so paltry, the kaiju fight would definitely take backseat. Wingard’s fight scenes for the monsters are so bad, only him being worse at the rest makes them better in comparison.

Godzilla vs. Kong is the pits.