The MCU’s Eternals copies a famous cover from the comics featuring Ikaris but fails to do it justice in live-action. As Phase 4 of the MCU unfolds, audiences are presented with a new superhero team in Chloé Zhao’s Eternals, perhaps Marvel's most controversial film, saddled with the MCU's lowest Rotten Tomatoes score. The film stars an ancient star-sailing superhero team who derive their powers and immortality from their creator, a Celestial named Arishem the Judge. The Eternals were sent to Earth thousands of years ago to protect its human inhabitants from the Deviants, large predatory creatures with a nasty people-eating habit. They also help human civilization to develop, though they do so with a strictly hands-off approach.
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The cover copying moment occurs during the film’s climactic battle between the Eternals as they fight over whether to save the Earth from an apocalyptic event brought about by Arishem (who may become one of the MCU's next big villains). The scene is based on the iconic cover of 2008's Eternals #6, which depicts a head-to-toe image of Ikaris, an Eternal with similar powers to Superman, firing lasers into the sky from his eyes as he breaks free from restraints placed on him by fellow Eternal Phastos. This is an emotionally fraught scene as Ikaris decides whether to support the other Eternals or the Celestial that made him.
The film butchers the cover in a number of ways. Firstly, the moment is broken into two shots. The first is a medium shot, showing Ikaris from the waist up. This shot weakens its grounding in the scene by omitting details in the background, and doesn’t pull in close enough for the audience to easily read the emotions of Richard Madden's character. The second is an extremely long shot, set so far back that the audience loses any sense of how the characters on the beach are reacting. What is more, by breaking the shot into two, and pulling away for the second, the film lessens the scene's emotional and stylistic weight, diminishing what could have been a powerful and memorable moment of character development. This recreation of the classic cover is too fleeting and disjointed to make for a memorable image.
The Shot Of Ikaris Pales Even Further When Compared To DCEU's Superman
In contrast, gravitas in moments like these does not seem to be as much of an issue for films in the DCEU. Perhaps the Eternals team could have drawn from the work of long-time DC collaborator Zack Snyder, a master at taking comic book moments and converting them into iconic cinematography. His work has made some wonder what a Zack Snyder Marvel movie would look like. Arguably, Snyder performs this duty to a fault, prioritizing snapshot moments over scenes and stories. But when it has worked, notably in Watchmen and 300, Snyder's reworks of iconic comic imagery have made for some epic movie moments.
One way the composition of the scene might have been bettered would have been to arrange the image with greater color contrast. The original cover for Eternals #6 has Ikaris against a dark backdrop, drawing the eye to his lasers, which cut a path straight up through the title. Snyder regularly uses color contrast when creating dramatic moments for Superman and often frames him against fire, the sun, or the light from his eye beams. The achievement of something similar during the final battle in Eternals seems frustratingly close as Angelina Jolie's Thena, suffering from Mahd Wy'ry, fights a Deviant in a cave not far from where Ikaris is held. Had the movie set Ikaris’ breakout against this darker backdrop, they might have achieved a more striking moment.
Comics are different from films, and it is crucial for filmmakers to strike a balance between capturing comic book imagery and directing films that prioritize storytelling over aesthetically pleasing moments that don't serve the film as a whole. That said, the needless changes to the framing of this iconic image don’t do any favors for Eternals. This minor issue further contributes to the feeling that the film is an uncharacteristically divisive offering from the MCU.