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To understand El Eternauta - especially what it represents for Argentine culture -, it is necessary to analyze the historical circumstances in which it was written.
It is 1957 and Argentina is governed by a military dictatorship that calls itself La Revolución Libertadora (The Liberating Revolution). They have come to power in 1955, after overthrowing the government of Juan Domingo Perón. Perón is a controversial figure in Argentine history - countless volumes could be written about his person and his political legacy, both for and against, and we still could not reach any definitive conclusion, except that everything he did and said influenced Argentine political life from the 1950s to the present day -. The main mission of La Revolución Libertadora is to combat Perón's ideas, following a process similar to the denazification of Germany after 1945. Books were burned, symbols and monuments were destroyed; Peronist followers were persecuted, kidnapped and tortured, many of whom ended up in jail or were shot; and any allusion to Perón was outlawed to the point of being considered a criminal act punishable by imprisonment.
In that context H.G. Oesterheld decides to write El Eternauta. At first it seems to be a science fiction adventure - a time traveler tells a witness (Oesterheld himself) what he has seen and lived, and warns him about a possible catastrophe in the future: that Argentina will be invaded by aliens -. But Oesterheld is a Peronist and decides to use the comic to send a veiled criticism to the military dictatorship of the time. The invaders kidnap, torture, kill people; they brainwash them and give them a new mental programming; and they even respond to the interests of other alien races of superior importance who are the ones who really give the orders. Just compare that with the process of deperonization of Argentina, plus the veiled criticism that the military are really puppets at the service of U.S. interests - which never tolerated Perón and always saw him as a Nazi sympathizer with dictatorial aspirations -, and the parallels between the comic and reality become obvious.
What Oesterheld is doing is actually nothing new. He's using science fiction as an allegorical mechanism to interpret the reality of those years... and that's something that comes from the time when the first alien invasion of the genre appeared - the publication of H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds in 1895 -. Did you think Wells' novel was about Martians invading Earth and enslaving humanity?. No!. Wells makes an intellectual experiment, imagining what would happen if Victorian Britain - the most powerful military power of the 19th century, which has expanded to the point of having colonies in all parts of the globe, which it exploits mercilessly to satisfy its war and commercial needs - were to receive a spoonful of its own soup. Just as the British easily subdued local tribes armed with bows and arrows or spears - using cannons, rifles and all the military paraphernalia they had at hand -, now the British would be forced to their knees before a vastly technologically superior enemy, which has its own colonialist agenda and which has evaporated all the military might of the empire in less than 48 hours... with the added bonus that the resource the Martians wish to harvest is human beings themselves (!).
Of course the basic idea of Wells' novel is so rich in possibilities that it can be adapted to any setting and reflect the paranoias of the time. Orson Welles abandons the Victorian setting, updates it to 1930s America and broadcasts it as a radio drama in 1938. And people panic, not because they believe that Martians are invading the USA but because they assume that Nazi Germany has landed in America. Similarly, when George Pal produces his formidable big screen version in 1953, the Martian invaders channel the fear of millions of Americans of a possible invasion of their own soil by the Soviet Union, if not an escalation of the Cold War leading to a war of devastation against which the world is helpless.
Oesterheld finished the comic book in 1959, but he would later retake it and expand its contents on two more occasions - in 1969, and later between 1976 and 1978 -. Each of those editions coincides with a military dictatorship - La Revolución Argentina (the Argentine Revolution, 1966-1973), and El Proceso de Reorganización Nacional (the National Reorganization Process, 1976-1983) -, and that is no coincidence. Each new version of El Eternauta comes with an increasingly critical and politically charged reading of reality. Already by that time Oesterheld went from being a sympathizer of Peronism to an active militant in the most radicalized wing of the movement - the guerrilla group Montoneros -, which forced him at one point to go underground. To continue publishing El Eternauta, Oesterheld appealed to all kinds of resources - from sending the scripts to the publishing house via third parties, to transmitting them by reading them from a public telephone -. All this would end very badly: Oesterheld - and his four daughters, whom he had enrolled in the Montoneros - would be kidnapped, tortured and murdered during the military dictatorship (circa 1977), becoming one more name in the long list of those “desaparecidos” (disappeared) by El Proceso. To this day the whereabouts of their bodies are unknown.
Since El Eternauta is based on the allegorical/political interpretation of the Argentine reality, it is impossible to make a faithful adaptation of the text without turning it into a period piece. Since 1968 - and when Oesterheld was still alive - there have been all kinds of attempts to bring it to film or television. There was an unsuccessful animation pilot - made using the Rotoscope technique - but it was slow and very expensive to produce (it was only enough to make a short film of less than half an hour) and, by the end of the 60s, it was not the ideal time to release it due to the political climate. Then there was talk of international co-productions, with directors such as Alex de la Iglesia, Adolfo Aristarain, Fernando “Pino” Solanas and Lucrecia Martel... but nothing ever came of it.
The drama with bringing El Eternauta to the cinema (or any other medium) is not much different from what happened with Alan Moore's Watchmen. They are cult works which, by definition, will never lead to blockbusters. There will always be a faithful minority that will revere them, but the majority of the public - especially in other latitudes - will not find them attractive. On the other hand, every cult work is met with the talibanization of the most loyal followers, who will instantly start objecting to the specific points where the adaptation has strayed from the original text (it happened to Zack Snyder with his version of Watchmen, and it happened to Peter Jackson with the Lord of the Rings trilogy). Added to this is what I call the “Catch 22” of this kind of works that have a wide variety of readings and are tied to a particular historical moment. The spectator, in order to understand the work, must first know what it is about, must do a previous work of historical research to know what was happening at that time, and must relate it to what he has just seen. Only in a second viewing of the adaptation will the spectator be able to relate each point to each i. In other words, they lack surprise and their meaning escapes the understanding of the casual viewer.
But, like Watchmen, if you amputate the historical context the work loses much of its original meaning (or if you don't find relevant themes in the current context that can successfully replace them); it is possible that El Eternauta could easily be adapted to other current scenarios that are as oppressive as Argentina in the 50s / 60s / 70s, such as a version set in Ukraine - where the aliens are the symbolic representation of invading Russia -, or even in Trumpist America, where the government has become a suffocating coercive force. If you add to this the fact that mounting such a scenario is something that far exceeds the possibilities of the Argentine film industry - a production that would easily cost between 10 to 15 million dollars, which will be a trifle for Hollywood but any non-US film is a fortune; think that Godzilla Minus One cost that much money, and left Toho's finances on the edge until it became an international mega hit -, and the problems to recover the investment, then you end up appealing to foreign co-producers who will surely demand changes. And the first thing they will ask for is that it is not a period production because that automatically increases production costs in costumes, make-up, sets, props, etc., according to the year in which the events take place. The second point that they are going to push is the casting issue: to put an international figure in charge of the cast - even if not Argentinean - in order to be able to sell the product to all kinds of international markets. All this puts in crisis the commitment to maintain the fidelity to the original text of the work, reason why the adaptation of El Eternauta was in the development hell for decades. Things changed when streaming appeared and Netflix entered the game. As the streaming giant's sponsorship of local productions has given it unexpected international successes - such as Squid Game and Money Heist -, financing El Eternauta is not a move that jeopardizes its balance sheets. Added to this is the added bonus that Argentina has an ace up its sleeve in the form of Ricardo Darín - one of the few national actors with international projection, omnipresent in every Argentine film that has been nominated for an Oscar in the last 25 years (including the 2009 Academy Award winner The Secret in Their Eyes) - so the issue of the “international prestige figure” is quickly settled.
Because I can't imagine George Clooney playing Juan Salvo and wandering the snowy streets of Vancouver - used as a muletto to replace the real Buenos Aires -.
Even knowing all this, it is enough to see the first frame of El Eternauta 2025 to feel a certain sense of sacrilege.
There are three teenage girls on a boat... and the first thing they do is take out their cell phones.
And having said all this, 50% of the effectiveness of El Eternauta has already gone down the drain.
As the six chapters released by Netflix in May 2025 are only half of the story, it's impossible to anticipate whether director Bruno Stagnaro (Pizza, Birra, Faso / Pizza, Beer, and Cigarettes, 1998) has been able to find a way to keep El Eternauta a relevant story without all of Oesterheld's symbolism. Only in Chapter 6 do we see a glimpse of the real alien invaders - the “Manos”, aliens with huge hands endowed with dozens of fingers - so when they open their mouths and reveal their intentions, we will realize whether Stagnaro's reinterpretation is valid, or El Eternauta has become just another routine sci-fi adventure. Coming to the cinema 70 years too late, what was innovative and reckless in 1957 is today treading on ground overexploited by hundreds of films that have tackled similar themes in the following decades. Extraterrestrial invasions?. War of the Worlds in all its versions, V (1983), Independence Day... and the list goes on and on. Mind control of humanity (or its replacement by copies manipulated by invaders)?. Invasion of the Body Snatchers and all its variants - especially Abel Ferrara's version, which takes place on a military base -. Mankind divided and the emergence of extremist factions with their own vision of survival at the end of the world?. The Day of the Triffids (please, check the 1981 miniseries) and all the films of other genres that have exploited its model, such as 28 Days Later.
The series begins like the comic book. A group of friends get together to play cards (the traditional Argentine “Truco”, a game played in pairs, and whose strategy consists of lying about the values of the cards each one has in his hand). The whole scene is full of Argentinisms (“relampijeando” “se largó... ya”) and malapropisms which, I assume, must have become a nightmare for the guys in charge of dubbing the series and translating it into other languages.
While the dialogue flows naturally, on the other hand none of these people are charismatic or sympathetic enough for the audience to empathize with them. There seems to be an undercurrent of subterranean grudges and jealousy among most of the group, as if the excuse of the game is a way to pass the buck among them for things they have done or ways of thinking they possess (in fact, one of the characters owes a large sum of money to another, sulks in a corner, and seems to resent the happiness of the others).
That unnatural thing in the behavior of the characters becomes more noticeable when the phenomenon - the fall of the toxic snow that instantly exterminates all the people who are exposed to it outdoors, as soon as they come into contact with it - starts. These people do not panic, they do not have crying fits, they do not think about the apocalypse, but they discuss among themselves a lot of banalities, especially about who is the alpha male who should make decisions about the fate of the group. The one who prevails is Alfredo Favalli a.k.a. “el Tano” who, being an electronic engineer, would come to be the know-it-all scientist of the group. While Favalli is by far the most coherent person in the cast - and makes a lot of decisions based on logic -, on the other hand when it comes to the scientific explanations of the phenomenon...
…hmmm…
El Eternauta 2025 borrows from the 2005 version of War of the Worlds (by Spielberg) the idea that a massive EMP pulse annihilated all electronic devices and caused a massive blackout in the whole city. In contrast to this, all the analog devices are still working, which serves as an excuse for a bunch of classic Argentine cars to enter the scene - from Jeep Estanciero vans to a glorious Torino coupe in immaculate red - which, being from the 50s and 60s, at least aesthetically give it the vintage look that Oesterheld's comic book had at the time of its original publication. But, on the other hand, when Favalli starts to come up with theories about the phenomenon, the explanations fall into nonsense. Like that the Earth's magnetism is dead - and that is why the compasses do not work; if one reads a scientific review of the film The Core (2003), if the Earth's magnetic field shuts down (i.e., the planet's core stops rotating), this would imply at least that the atmosphere would no longer be chained to the Earth, besides triggering all kinds of harmful effects related to gravity -. Or that the toxic snow is particles from the Van Allen Belts falling to the surface of our world, which is a monumentally absurd explanation - if it were so and the Van Allen Belts disappeared, the Earth would be unprotected from cosmic rays and solar winds, and would be instantly scorched -. And all this nonsense has only one reason for being: to save production costs. In the comic book the story is much simpler and linear: the snow is produced by an alien machine and Salvo and a commando group managed to destroy it, but shooting that sequence would imply a couple of chapters more, apart from a quota of extra special effects. Not only does the snow magically disappear from one day to the next, but the atmosphere becomes instantly breathable. (Besides, if the aliens had the immense power to control the center of the Earth and the cosmic belts surrounding the planet, they could enslave humanity in a couple of hours, without having to fight a long and tedious battle for control of the world, block by block).
Certainly the first two chapters don't inspire much confidence. They establish the mystery, but the human factor, at times, becomes exasperating...and not in the best of ways. This group of people are so intent on discussing nonsense among themselves that they seem oblivious to the terrifying phenomena going on outside. The protagonist is obsessed with knowing the whereabouts of his daughter - he is divorced and his relationship with his ex-wife is far from the best - and he doesn't understand reasons about the external danger or the kind of care he should take in order to survive. When they put together a makeshift suit for him - with a gas mask like the ones firefighters wear so as not to get smoke poisoning (one of the many strange things Favalli keeps in his basement), putting nylon bags on his feet and gloves on his hands, and all sealed with generous doses of duct tape - Salvo / Darín does not agree to take a gun with him, which is a case of extreme naiveté. Naive characters abound in the story - especially the women, who seem to blindly trust in the goodness of human beings, even in the midst of an apocalypse where the logical alternatives are people fighting to the death for the meager resources left in the local businesses, which are constantly looted to the point of desolation - and there are moments when they are annoying (and the big problem I have with this is that these people, living in a sort of alternative version of the 21st century, never saw War of the Worlds, The Walking Dead or any apocalyptic fiction, something that would give them a minimum of culture on how people could act in this kind of cases - looting, gangs, etc -, a detail that was easily solved by keeping the original setup of the 50's where people lacked the culture of the science fiction genre and were much more naive). On the other hand, when Juan Salvo encounters survivors, they end up being clichés - like the manager of the building where his ex-wife lives, who is a sour and arrogant guy and wants to take away his improvised equipment to wander in the snow, supported by a blind mob that follows him unconditionally and is ready to lynch him -. Between that case and that of other neighbors who have decided to form a militia to prevent the looting of neighborhood businesses (and practically extort Favalli to join them, otherwise, they can expropriate his house and his property), you get the impression that El Eternauta is going to fall into the same scenarios of John Wyndham's The Day of the Triffids, where a catastrophe of planetary magnitude served as an excuse for the author to see how society would disintegrate and begin to organize itself into radicalized groups, from militias to dangerous religious fanatics. There is some of that - in a moment of exploration Salvo comes across a nun who is in charge of a church (she is the sole survivor of the parish), and has organized both the people living on the street and the boy scout group that used to go there, into a kind of militia unit equipped with weapons and traps prepared with gasoline to resist the eventual siege of the aliens (in this case, huge beetles bigger than a car that wrap their victims in a kind of spider's web). ... all this less than 48 hours after the start of the toxic snow phenomenon (!) -; but these ideas are never fully explored and, just as they appear in the story, they disappear without a trace, simply as anecdotes of Salvo's journey in his tireless search for his daughter's whereabouts.
At least the series picks up in a big way when the aliens appear in chapter four. Oesterheld used the alien beetles as a strike force and, if one looks at the publication dates of the original comic book, the Argentinean is two years ahead of Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers of 1959, where an alien race (composed entirely of insects) enters into an interplanetary war against the human race (to illustrate the theme, just watch the cult version that Paul Verhoeven filmed in 1997). But here the beetles are only the foot soldiers; as Favalli rightly says “it's impossible for these bugs to drive a spaceship”, so that - at the end of the first six episodes - we only get a glimpse of the real invaders (the “Manos”) in the final five minutes of the last episode.
And all of that makes a lot more sense than Heinlein's story, with giant beetles farting energy across half the galaxy and falling to Earth, wiping out entire cities (one of them, Buenos Aires!).
When it comes to action, El Eternauta is brilliant. The encounters with the “bugs” are tension-filled, brutal and filmed flawless. The whole technical part is impeccable - the vision of the snow-covered streets of Vicente Lopez is breathtaking; the CGI of the beetles is excellent, as is the endless fall of meteorites (which are nothing more than the alien ships arriving to our planet and staining the skies with an impressive red color) -. It is in these moments - where the protagonists stop being stubborn or distracting themselves with their petty grudges and personal vendettas - that the essence of the original story comes to light: the desperation of the common man trying to survive in an environment that was familiar to him until a few hours ago and that has mutated into an inhospitable and lethal scenario overnight. A new detail added to the script, which was not in Oesterheld's original, is that Juan Salvo is a veteran of the Malvinas War. On the one hand, it humanizes the hero - he is a man with constant crises due to PTSD - but, on the other hand, it transforms him into a sort of Argentine Rambo, since the conscript training he received in 1982 has given him a diabolical aim that puts the bullet where the eye is (even though more than 40 years have passed since the conflict and Salvo has never picked up a gun again). At least Salvo's nightmares - where images of combat on the islands, buried in foxholes, suffering freezing temperatures, battling at midnight with the light of flares - find their parallel with the apocalyptic images of the red nights of Buenos Aires, illuminated by the constant arrival of alien spacecraft… but anticipating the central theme of the comic - that at some point Salvo will become a time traveler (a man wandering through eternity... hence The Eternaut) and, as he has been to the future, he knows what is going to happen although he has no data to interpret the information that comes to him in his visions / nightmares at the present time -.
El Eternauta is uneven. It has some very successful things but, at times, it gets distracted from the main conflict and wastes too much time with poorly written, banal or downright obnoxious secondary characters, like the Asian student they find locked up in a high school and who, when Salvo frees him, all he does is insult and sabotage him all the time instead of being grateful to his liberator or, at least, being shocked with the way the world has changed in less than 48 hours. There are moments where it feels like there are too many characters and none of them get the development time they deserve. And there are other moments of enormous ingenuity, such as when a mall is transformed into a sort of hippie community where everyone shares everything when in reality it would have been more logical for a militia to have taken over that endless source of resources and fortified and defended it tooth and nail.
As a science fiction production made in Argentina, El Eternauta is vastly superior to anything local cinema has done on the subject - and the first thing that comes to mind is argentine movies with epic aspirations of the likes of La Sonámbula / Sleepwalker (1998) or the animated film Condor Crux (2000) -. Considering that Argentina is not a particularly fertile place for the science fiction genre - local writers like to go for minimalist stories or bordering on the fantastic, such as the mind control in Extraña Invasión / Stay Tuned for Terror (1965), the encounter with inexplicable phenomena like Moebius (1996), or Jorge Luis Borges' obsession with labyrinths, doubles, mirrors and the enigmas of infinity -, Oesterheld's comic did something impossible, which is to take one of the most popular themes of the genre - the extraterrestrial invasion - and adapt it to local customs and habits, adding a powerful allegorical vision. Too bad the 2025 version seems to have forgotten Oesterheld's subtext: it tries out its own variations on the theme, succeeds in many of its new machinations, and falls into cliché in so many others.
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