I have a real soft spot for Eternals. Perhaps the most maligned and misunderstood movie in the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) canon, Eternals doesn’t have the funky irreverence of Guardians of the Galaxy, nor does it bring together the box office icons of the first five Avengers movies, but there’s a lot to admire from director Chloé Zhao’s ambitious efforts to give the world yet another band of iconic superheroes to mindlessly idolise.
Rotten Tomatoes neatly catalogued Eternals to be “an ambitious superhero epic that soars as often as it strains”, and that, to my mind at least, remains an apt summation. There’s a feeling of a project that has genuine vision and insight – no surprise given its director’s Oscar-winning credentials – and while one senses the corruptive hand of the committee pulling focus away from that singular vision, you can often glimpse shoots of inspiration peaking through from underneath a rather unwieldy plot, clunky passages of exposition and some tenuous links to the rest of the MCU. In its favour, there are moments of emotional resonance, it often looks sublime and, most importantly, it’s one of the best-sounding Marvel movies ever made.
That final quality is the result, almost entirely, of the film’s official soundtrack, penned by Ramin Djawadi, the man who gave us the accompaniments to the likes of Pacific Rim, Westworld and the Uncharted movie, not to mention the endless hours of listening pleasure from his scoring of Game of Thrones. GOT might have dipped in quality as it progressed, but Djawadi’s scores only improved as TV’s most disappointing finale blundered its way onto our screens and out of our hearts. (I'm still angry.)
Thankfully, Djawadi did it again with Eternals. Swapping out the generic, crash-and-bash scores that you’d find playing underneath much of roughly 15 years of big-bucks superhero mayhem, the Eternals OST evidences a more mature and, say it quietly, musically refined approach, making heavy use of the rich, drawn out strings and rich vocals that made the Game Of Thrones score such a rewarding goldmine of soul-warming symphonies and dread-inducing accompaniments.
There’s certainly enough nuance and musical richness to serve you well if you’re up for straining your music system’s capabilities. Standout track Across The Oceans Of Time has become a real favourite over the past few weeks and months, mainly because it will give you a clear indication of how your set-up is handling aspects such as vocal reproduction, organisation and spaciousness, building from a single female vocal point and then blossoming to incorporate a swell of deeper voices and those rich, full strings of which Djawadi is clearly so fond.
Weaker products will render the whole arrangement sounding compact and lacking in airiness, while the best models, be they proper floorstanding speakers or even the best Bluetooth speakers, will draw out each individual layer (think of an exploded lasagne), pulling the composition apart so that the high notes hover above, the midrange sits in the middle and the bass anchors the whole composition with solidity and authority. It’s a trial that has helped to make or break the organisational credentials of many a wireless speaker or hi-fi heavyweight that has passed through our test doors in recent months.
Most of all, Across The Oceans Of Time should elicit a tangible emotional response in the listener, especially if said listener has seen the movie and understands its contextual significance. It’s a heartfelt, resonant work that helps to humanise further a pair of characters that have just spent the last hour and a half summoning shiny energy orbs or firing lasers from their eyeballs, so simply hearing the track again – and thinking back to the climax which it accompanies – should be enough to have your eyes watering all over again. Or that might just be me.
Don't fret that you’ll be deprived of those loud, signature anthems on which any super soundtrack worth its salt is built, either. The Eternals theme is no different, pounding out those filling-shaking percussive passages beneath a bold, brass-heavy melody that will tease out any system’s adeptness for dynamics, arrangement and sonic authority.
Further offerings wend and weave their way within the narrative's fabric, allowing Djawadi a showcase not only for his talents but for the myriad influences on which his magpie-like gaze has occasionally lingered. Emergence Sea (it’s a dire pun, I know) shadows the solemn, clanking bells and rasping brass of Zimmer’s darker material, while the solemnity of Remember or Isn’t It Beautiful shows shades of Thomas Newman, Alan Silvestri or even John Williams. So many scores simply mine the same theme or motif, repackaging and recontextualising it in a bid to fill out the minutes, but each instalment of Djawadi's soaring score stands up as its own entity and leaving you spoiled for choice depending on which facet of technical prowess you feel like your system needs testing.
While influences abound and genres flow and eddy, the Eternals score feels nothing if not unique and intimate in a sea of what can often be generic comic book smush. The movie itself dares to be different, squeezing in big ideas and a weighty, emotional tone into a narrative that can’t quite support them. The music, too, has aspirations beyond the purely functional, resulting in a score that soars, intrigues and, more than occasionally, profoundly connects. Chloé Zhao’s epic may be a flawed giant, but there’s very little to fault in what has quickly become one of my most beloved scores for testing audio products.
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