With no shade intended toward either Mr Weldon or Eternals’ Chloe Zhao, it’s a sorry statement about the current cultural landscape that the faint presence of an individual director’s style is now such a rare event that it’s one we’re invited to celebrate. The result, Weldon argues, is a film which “pushes back” against the standard complaints issued by those who “harbor a performative disdain for Marvel’s cinematic output” and, presumably, against those of us who find fault with the exhausting uniformity of the entire superhero genre. And it does get ground up, to a certain extent. Because, as Weldon himself acknowledges, the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s (MCU) leaden, formulaic aesthetic still dominates the movie so much that flickers of the director’s own style are, at best, a negligible presence: “You’d be forgiven,” he writes, “for assuming that Zhao’s directorial presence would get buried, caught up in the gears of the MCU machine and ground into the same uniformly fine powder that gets baked into every Marvel movie. Acknowledging that the whole genre has by this point become a kind of cultural white noise, he nevertheless proceeds to discover a sonorous whisper amid the din - in this case, the artistic imprint of indie director Chloe Zhao, whose influence is “ all over Eternals.” Well, not quite. In a recent write-up on the new Marvel flick Eternals, NPR reviewer Glen Weldon looks to find a silver lining in the release of yet another superhero monstrosity.
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