Nomandland writer-director and Academy Award-winner Chloé Zhao is celebrated as a humanist, naturalistic storyteller. A filmmaker who sinks into the very pores of the characters and communities she crafts her movies around. Telling stories from a deep understanding of what make these people tick and the idiosyncratic customs of their way of life, Zhao champions the use of non-actors and the backdrop of mother nature to achieve a lived-in, grounded aesthetic. With Zhao’s films, you often feel as if you’ve stepped into another universe, one that’s been squirreled away on some part of our planet we just didn’t know existed.

Eternals, the twenty-sixth or so entry in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (it gets confusing when you factor in the various limited series they now have going on over on Disney+), attempts to harness exactly these storytelling skills, unveiling immortal beings called “Eternals” who live amongst humankind but have remained in the shadows for centuries. Zhao is set to be our guide, allowing us to peek at this squirreled away society existing all along on our world. Sadly, her attempt to do so misfires massively, delivering a clunky, flat superhero team-up movie which debates philosophical principals of the greater good with all the nuance of a stoned college freshman.

Eternals is not the worst MCU movie to date – Zhao’s raw talent and the film’s admittedly unique aspirations prevent that – but it’s probably the most dull. More surprising than this, despite her naturalistic style, the composition of Zhao’s shots are stodgy; stiffly devised to cram the dozen or so Eternals into the same frame on a remarkable amount of occasions. The impressive cinematography and naturalistic lighting is worth celebrating but the actual blocking of scenes prove uninspired and lifeless. Any distinction between a natural background and a CG-created one falls away when it’s used only as a backdrop for weak action and somber superhero posturing. Designed as if to be more easily cut into a trailer, scenes feels awkward and stagey in a way that Zhao’s films never do. Self-serious but in a portentous way. Eternals is meant to be Shakespearean in tone but is too often blocked like Shakespeare in the Park.

Ambitious but flawed, the screenplay from Chloé Zhao, Patrick Burleigh (Peter Rabbit 2: The Runaway), and first-time feature writers (and brothers) Ryan Firpo and Kaz Firpo smushes the entirety of human history into a girthy two hours and thirty-seven minute runtime, diluting the course of Homo sapiens down to a series of sword and sandal skirmishes and slowly developing technologies. The gist of it involves a lot of mumbo-jumbo about Celestials, God-like universe builders, who accidentally unleashed sinewy demon-beasts known as Deviants upon their creation in order to do some basic population control. They miscalculate. Whoops.

To fix this, the Celestials, led by the planet-sized Arishem, then create Eternals, obedient cosmic soldiers each with their own golden CGI pew-pew power, sent to fend off the pesky Deviants. On Earth, the Eternals have watched humans throughout the centuries, nudging them along in their evolution every so often like by inventing the plow (and maybe the atomic bomb?) In order to shrug off why these overpowered beings didn’t intervene when Thanos came to town and snapped away half the population, we learn that the Eternals have been instructed by Arishem not to intervene in the matters of humans unless it specifically involves Deviants.

Whereas previous “origins” films are typically meant to introduce the individual contributors before slamming them together to team up and save the world, Eternals has the Herculean task of introducing a whole stable of new characters. None of the dozen or so characters are given much breathing room and, unsurprisingly, none make much of an impression. At the center of this story, there’s Sersi (Gemma Chan), the soft-spoken moralist who is chosen to lead the Eternals when former “boss” Ajak (Salma Hayek) is found killed on her South Dakota ranch; and Ikaris (Richard Madden), the most powerful of the Eternals – he’s the Marvel equivalent of Superman – and the Eternals’ de-facto leader. His 5000-year relationship with Sersi ended before they are forced to band together and save the world. Awkward.

Also in the mix is Thena (Angelina Jolie), a goddess of war who suffers a form of dementia that leads her to blindingly attack her allies; Sprite (Lia McHugh) an immortal stuck in a child’s body who is able to project illusions; Makkari (Lauren Ridloff), basically The Flash but deaf; Druig (Barry Keoghan), a master telepath who really wants to stop war; Gilgamesh (Ma Dong-seok), a caring brute with super strength; Kingo (Kumail Nanjiani), group comic relief whose superpower is literally finger guns; and Phastos (Brian Tyree Henry), the quartermaster of the gang, always inventing new tech.

The collection of talent is impressive on paper but they lack chemistry, any dimensionality to their relationships are papered over with a need to churn out exposition. There’s a general stiffness to the character’s interaction with one another, which is only exacerbated by cringe dialogue and the occasional algorithmically-calculated quip thrown in to assure audiences that Eternals is indeed a Marvel property. None of it fits together properly and the result is oddly earnest, unfunny, and eternally stiff. The MVP here is Harish Patel as Kingo’s enthusiastic valet Karun, ironically the only dude who doesn’t have any superpowers.

Since Eternals not only needs to introduce all these new characters but an entirely new corner of cosmic mythology to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, there’s a ledger of meaty exposition to get through, making for one of Marvel’s most convoluted and long-winded offerings to date. When the pending “emergence” of a new Celestial threatens the balance of life on Earth, the Eternals are forced to take sides, triggering a moral quandary about interventionism and the greater good that lacks true depth. The philosophy of the film – a cosmic scale debate on the merits and perils of interventionism – is about as deep as an introductory-level discussion on The Trolley Problem, that infamous ethical dilemma about sacrifice and agency. There isn’t anything here that’s particularly thoughtful or worth dwelling on, regardless of how hard Chan or Madden stare off into an (admittedly beautiful) sunrise.

Scrambling from country to country, century to century, Eternals suggests a grand road trip through time that touches upon the many histories of our world but it all plays as rather inert. Making pit stops in 5000 BC Mesopotamia or 1945 Hiroshima works better in theory than in practice and results in choppy editing and a sluggish pace. The special effects are overindulgently used and flat, making for set pieces that fail to move the needle in terms of our engagement. Superheroes shooting gold beams out of their eyes and fingers just isn’t very visually interesting. Especially if you don’t really care about their fates.

CONCLUSION: Over-plotted and underwhelming, ‘Eternals’ is a choppy, self-serious dud for the Marvel Cinematic Universe. With a huge cast that fails to get enough individual breathing room, this sprawling should-be-epic fails to connect, despite obvious ambition. If Zhao is such a naturalist, why then does ‘Eternals’ feel so plastic?