'Eternals' had received the lowest Rotten Tomatoes score (48% fresh) of any film in the 13-year history of the MCU, making it the first official 'Rotten' film in the series. Photo: Handout
I disagree with other critics all the time, and don't generally blink an eye about it, but as soon as the news dropped that Eternals, the Marvel epic directed by Chloe Zhao, had received the lowest Rotten Tomatoes score (48% fresh) of any film in the 13-year history of the MCU, making it the first official "Rotten" film in the series, my hidden-agenda detector went on high alert.
Rotten Tomatoes scores are, to put it mildly, not something to be regarded as if they'd been handed down on stone tablets. Yet based on that score, and much of the web chatter about the movie, and the fact that it received a mere "B" from audiences polled by CinemaScore (horrors!), a meme has set in about Eternals: "Worst. Marvel. Movie. Ever." Or, at the very least, a creative debacle. If you believe, as I do, that that's an outlandish piece of hyperbole, then you're going to start wondering about how and why, exactly, this collective trashing came to be.
On a recent episode of The Take, my colleagues Clayton Davis and Elizabeth Wagmeister agreed that the Eternals-as-MCU-disaster idea was, on some level, not unrelated to the fact that the film's director is a woman.
"Anytime a woman takes on the action genre, which has been made typically for men to helm," explained Davis, "people come down harder on that filmmaker."
I think there is much truth to that assertion. A recent example: We saw the same kind of gnashing critical overstatement when Cathy Yan directed the 2020 DC film Birds Of Prey (And The Fantabulous Emancipation Of One Harley Quinn). Chloe Zhao, fresh off her 2020 Oscar triumph with Nomadland, put serious things aside to play in the Marvel sandbox, and suddenly she has made the worst Marvel film ever. That's deeply suspect. Especially considering that Zhao has such luminous technique as a filmmaker, much of which is on display in Eternals.
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