‘The Eternaut’ Review – A Slow-Burn Apocalyptic Drama That Requires Patience

There must be something compelling about the end of the world, since nothing seems more popular in our entertainment these days than the brutal post-apocalypse. Every major network and streaming service needs one. HBO has The Last of Us. Apple TV+ has Silo. Netflix, to be fair, has a whole bunch, plucked from all over the world, but Argentinian series The Eternaut feels closest to the quintessential template of a prestige post-apocalypse. It’s a character-focused slow-burn with striking visuals and very grim twists and turns, and like the shows above, it’s based on something else – not a video game or a book, but a graphic novel, writer Héctor G. Oesterheld and illustrator Francisco Solano Lopez’s 1957 one of the same name.

I haven’t read that graphic novel, so don’t ask me about the show’s closeness to it. Showrunner Bruno Stagnaro could have adapted it panel by panel for all I know, but it looks great either way. The chilling – literally! – story of a Buenos Aires in complete collapse seems very much made for TV though, interspersing it’s slower, character-driven moments with splashes of action and last-minute swerves timed with a watchmaker’s precision to keep binge-watchers on the hook.

The thing about Buenos Aires as a setting is that it tends not to snow. So when the summer night sky breaks open with flakes of the white stuff, it’s already weird. The hook of The Eternaut is that the snow is fatally toxic, instantly killing anyone whose skin it comes into contact with. For Juan Salvo (Ricardo Darin, Argentina, 1985) and his friends, who were just trying to enjoy a boozy game of cards, the inclement weather immediately makes a prison of the small home they’re holed up in. But with the fates of loved ones unknown, it doesn’t take long for the gang to fashion ad hoc protective suits and set out into the unknown, where it quickly becomes clear that the snowfall might only be the opening salvo of an extraterrestrial invasion.

Some things are immediately striking about this show. The societal collapse occurs very quickly, and mostly off-screen. The glimpses we get of bustling Buenos Aires – the 50s timeline of the graphic novel has been changed to the present day – seem recognisable enough, even if they’re charged with a rebellious energy stemming from issues with power cuts and fires at a local electrical station. But then we don’t see normality again. Juan and the others look out of a window to see the snow falling and society at a complete standstill, the humps of partially-buried corpses the only indication that people were ever here. It’s a striking image, and once Juan sets out at the end of the first episode, you begin to see more and more evidence of a place having been almost instantaneously flash-frozen; workers dangling from pylons, policemen lolling out of crashed patrol cars, and protesters buried beneath their placards.

Also interesting: Juan and his pals intuit immediately that the snow is toxic. It takes only one unavoidable and idiotic self-sacrifice to make the point clear. It doesn’t take half a season of explanation and gradual realization, they just look out of a window and put two and two together. How refreshing! That respect for the audience’s time and intelligence characterizes The Eternaut through most of its runtime, even when some sequences sag a little. Even then, though, you’re never too far away from a major development or set-piece that reinvigorates everything, giving the show a consistent and effective pace, if not necessarily a breakneck one.

And it looks exceptionally good. I’m sure there are some supplementary VFX helping to create the bigger illusions, but at its core this is a show that looks and feels a lot more real than you’d expect it to, an effect exacerbated by smart decisions with the sound design, costuming, and camera work. First-person shots through gas masks steaming slightly with ragged breaths; wide city streets blanketed by snow and dotted with corpses, eerily canted and still; maze-y apartments and derelict buildings held in creepy stasis. It all contributes to an excellent sustained atmosphere of dread, especially as more secrets are gradually revealed.

That process can sometimes feel a little too gradual, granted, but it’s all in service of a character-driven story that finds equal terror in its more alien threats as it does its home-grown ones. There’s a lot to discover and unpack here, and it’s consistently enjoyable to do so. Given how much of The Eternaut is built on the twin pillars of mystery and surprise, I’d be very interested to hear what fans of the original graphic novel made of it. But for those like me who are entering the show without any foreknowledge about the secrets it holds, enjoy. The payoff is worth the investment.

Read More: The Eternaut Ending Explained