*Warning for major spoilers for The Eternals
Some time ago we published a series called Top 6 Ways To Undermine Your Female Hero. It's a "guide" to some of the most common tropes through which female characters in action and superhero films are undermined. In the year 2021, it was disappointing to see that even though The Eternals had a promising cast that includes five women and a female director, the film still somehow stepped squarely into some of the most easily avoided of these tropes. And sadly, it didn't stop there: not only were all the female characters undermined, but most of the males ones were too! How could things go so wrong?
So let's start with the film's main protagonist Sersi. It's lovely that Gemma Chan's character was essentially turned into the film's main hero. It's definitely a first for the franchise—making an Asian woman the lead. It certainly challenged our expectations of the film since most of us probably went into it thinking that Richard Madden's Ikarus would be the protagonist. Which he still was of course, he just ended up being the villain instead of the hero in a less than surprising plot twist. But as nice as it was to see Gemma Chan take the lead, it was also underwhelming at the same time because the film never actually gives her a chance to show off what she can do before the final decisive moment.
Halfway through, when she manages to turn a 'Deviant' into a grotesque-looking tree, everyone is surprised that she is able to do that, including Sersi herself. As a matter of fact, Sersi's powers were actually toned down for the film. The MCU Sersi is only half as powerful as comic book Sersi, which means that she is only able to overpower the nascent Celestial Tiamut by accessing the collective power of all the Eternals through Phastos' convenient last-minute invention, not because she is inherently more powerful than the other Eternals.
But these are all plot-related concerns about Sersi. The main issue with this film is how it approaches the issue of female power. In Top 6 Ways To Undermine Your Female Hero, we write that there is a trope in storytelling wherein powerful female characters who do not conform to patriarchal expectations of femininity and motherhood often tend to be punished by the narrative. The Eternals is a prime example of this. Putting aside the fact that Sersi's powers are undermined by the MCU, it was disappointing to see that the quality that apparently made her worthy of being the film's main hero was her motherly virtue. Don't get us wrong, that is certainly no bad thing. But in a film where the other powerful women are either killed, villainised or stripped of autonomy, it kind of seems as if we're being suggested that, once again, conventional femininity and a motherly disposition are preferable to gender-non-conforming behaviour. Sersi fits the feminine ideal and is rewarded for it, while the other female characters fail to do so and suffer as a result. The cherry on top is the fact that Angelina Jolie's Thena spends the entire film completely undermined as a character: she's a warrior, and coincidentally, she also can't control her powers or her mind, and even requires the male character of Gilgamesh to tell her who she is—to give her her sense of identity, never mind that his sole task in the film is to babysit her. Angelina deserved better!
Sersi's ascension to the role of 'main hero of the story' probably would have come across better if she weren't being seemingly singled out as being more worthy due to her more traditionally feminine expression. (Like, was one shot of her playing with children not enough?) It's unexpected to have to say this about a film led by a female director of Chloe Zhao's caliber, but The Eternals seems to take some of the most easily avoidable negative tropes about female power and runs away with them. Prior to the release of the film, a big deal was made out of how Salma Hayek's character, Ajak, was gender-flipped from the comic books. It was important because Hayek would be leading the Eternals; Hayek, a Latina woman. But of course, that didn't really happen, as Ajak actually ends up spending literally the entire film being dead. What's the use in congratulating Marvel for giving us a prominent Latina actress to lead a superhero group when we never even get to see her potential? The most screen time Ajak receives is when Ikarus murders her.
And as frustrating as the undermining of Sersi, Thena, and Ajak already is, we haven't even touched on Sprite. Sprite is the Eternal who exists in child form and is beloved by all the others. Yet, for some reason, Sprite is made to have a strange obsession with Ikarus, and it is ultimately revealed that she's in love with him. The romantic dramas between the Eternals already felt too much like a soap opera before this reveal, but this one really pushed the limit. The need to make Sprite's child-like form an issue that the character struggles with is understandable, and it could have easily been done by writing in scenes in which Sprite struggles to fit into human society. Her desire to know what it's like to grow up and to be treated like an equal are heartfelt character points, but manifesting these genuine feelings as a one-sided infatuation with the villainous white guy in the film completely undermines the authenticity of those feelings. To then have Sprite completely abandon her morals and her loyalties for no other reason than that she has unreciprocated feelings for Ikarus feels like a stretch. Were we supposed to take that as a serious plot development? It's hard to see why we should. Sprite has no priorly established reason to turn against her friends, and she certainly has no priorly established moral failings to suggest that she'd blindly follow a villain in his quest to obliterate humanity. It would have felt much more authentic to her character to have her follow him solely due to her resentment against humanity for her inability to fit in to society, rather than forcing in an unneccessary and, frankly, weird romance plot that does nothing for anyone’s character development.
The one shining light in this film was Makkari, who is objectively the best character. Not only is Lauren Ridloff's portrayal of her fresh and charming, but Makkari is the one character in the film who isn't undermined in some way. It's heartening to say that, since it means that there will now be a higher chance of representation for people with disabilities to increase. But the fact remains that in a film with such an impressive cast and director, its failings are hard to accept. Even with the male characters, the film falls squarely into the negative trope of sidelining, desexualising and ridiculing Asian men (they really worked overtime to ensure Thena and Gilgamesh's relationship remained platonic and to make a joke out of the 'fat Indian guy') and it even places the weight of genocide on the shoulders of the franchise's first openly gay character. While the latter point works within the story, giving it a lot of emotional weight, it's understandable that people from the LGBTQ community would be unhappy that the man responsible for the bombing of Hiroshima (in-universe) is their first representative in the world's biggest franchise.
Are we ever going to be happy with a Marvel movie, you ask? We want to be. We love superheroes. But the truth is that it’s not enough to be a massive franchise to produce good films—to create well-written stories. But the more people push, the better these films will get in the long run, so in the meantime, let’s criticise away!
By R. Jordan Ortiz