Gemma Chan wows in a semi sheer black diamond encrusted skirt and top at Eternals premiere

Gemma Chan wowed as she showcased her toned midriff at the Eternals premiere at the BFI IMAX Waterloo in London on Wednesday.

The actress, 38, oozed with confidence as she walked the red carpet in her show stopping co-ord. 

The film star, who plays Sersi in the Marvel film, looked incredible in a semi sheer black diamond encrusted floor length skirt and long sleeved top. 

The stunning top was embellished with a hood which the actor had pulled up over her hair. 

Underneath the sheer flowing skirt the beauty sported knee-high black boots and high waisted shorts. 

Her brunette locks were styled in a sleek centre parting and her glam makeup enhanced her striking features.  

Gemma posed with co-star Salma Hayek for a slew of snaps before making their way into the venue. 

Eternals is a 2021 Marvel film based on the fictional race of humanoids of the same name which appears in the American comic books.

The film sees the Eternals, an immortal alien race, come out of hiding for thousands of years to protect Earth from their evil counterparts, the Deviants.

The movie, which premiered in Los Angeles earlier this month, stars Angelina as elite warrior Thena and Gemma as the character Sersi. 

The cast includes MCU’s first deaf superhero (Lauren Ridloff as Makkari) and its first openly gay superhero (Brian Tyree Henry as Phastos) who shares the franchise’s first onscreen same-sex kiss with Haaz Sleiman, who plays his husband.

In ELLE’s 2021 Women In Hollywood issue, Angelina – who is an advocate for refugees – discusses her upcoming movie and praises The Eternals’ director, Oscar-winner Chloé Zhao for her choice of casting.

‘A lot of times as an actress, you’re that individual strong woman, or you have one sister; you don’t often have this family where you really get to know women and see all the different strengths,’ Jolie explained. 

Praising her co-stars, she continued: ‘Gemma’s grace and elegance and the way she walks through the world. Salma’s motherhood and power, and Lauren’s connection and intelligence. Everybody came as themselves.

‘Maybe there’s something to that, that the characters weren’t as far off [from ourselves]. I think there’s a secret that we don’t know that our director knows, because if you look at her films, she casts a lot of real people as their roles and it shapes her films.’

She reveals in the issue that when she was first contacted about the movie, she thought it was going to play a ‘grandmother’ type role.

‘I never thought I was going to be one of the Eternals. It doesn’t happen. It’s never happened to me like that before without a fight and like, ‘I can do this, please hire me!’ When she told me I was one of them, I was like, ”Me, Mexican, Middle Eastern? Me, in my fifties? I’m going to be a superhero in a Marvel movie?” Sometimes as a woman, as a woman of colour and with the age, you feel so overlooked,’ she said.

Commending Zao for ‘having balls’, she championed the director for ‘acknowledging’ her within the industry.

Ridloff, whose character Makkari is deaf like her and the first deaf superhero within the Marvel universe, reveals she jumped at the chance to ‘show representation’ on screen in a ‘refreshing’ way, while Chan praises Marvel for showing diversity on a global scale with its movies.

Ahead of its release, Eternals has already been branded ‘disappointing’ and ‘ultimately unmemorable’ by critics in its first reviews.

The superhero flick was lambasted by critics over its ‘miserably undernourished’ script, deluge of underdeveloped characters and ‘overloaded’ storyline.  

Critics were torn as the ‘refreshingly diverse’ cast of characters resulted in a group of ‘navel-gazing superheroes’ that signalled ‘two steps forwards for representation but three steps backwards for dramatic ingenuity.’ 

The Times critic Kevin Maher gave the film two stars and took aim at the 157-minute flick’s script and its ‘strange self-sabotaging energy.’

He wrote: ‘It is the characters, however, who represent the biggest shift away from the swaggering, mostly white, mostly male, mostly straight, mostly neurotypical and mostly hearing ensembles (think Iron Man, Captain America, Thor, etc) that have defined the Marvel brand thus far.’

Adding the ‘reinvented heroes work’ he continued: ‘But they are also, to paraphrase Pirandello, ten characters in search of a script. Because the one they have now, co-written by Chloé Zhao, the director (Nomadland), is derivative, messy and miserably undernourished.

‘Eternals is two steps forwards for representation but three steps backwards for dramatic ingenuity. 

Variety critic Owen Gleiberman  branded the film a ‘disappointment’ over lacking the ‘raw and real’ signature quality Zhao has brought to her other films. 

He wrote: ‘Yet as I approached Eternals, the question I was most curious about was whether Zhao, who in Nomadland and The Rider defined her filmmaking style in a unique poetic way, would carry any remnants of that mode over to the blockbuster universe… Eternals has none of that. It’s clear that that’s something of a disappointment.

He added the film feels ‘very standard’ in comparison to ‘top-tier’ team superhero films (the first Guardians of the Galaxy, Zack Snyder’s Justice League, and ‘Avengers: Infinity War) and that the film ‘never transcends its conventionality’ 

He did however laud the diversity of the cast, writing: ‘Four of the Eternals are white, three are Asian, two are Black, and one is Latina. One is gay, one is deaf, and one is an androgynous tween who never grows up. 

‘Any troll who surveys this lively medley of backgrounds and temperaments only to gripe that the movie is too ‘woke’ might have lodged the same complaint about Star Trek 55 years ago.’   

The Guardian critic Steve Rose scored the film two stars once again and likened it to a ‘sophisticated PowerPoint presentation’ due to its comprehensive mythological storyline.  

He wrote: ‘There is also an epic mythology to get our heads around: even before a line of dialogue is spoken, three dense paragraphs of text explain how our 10 Eternals came to earth to protect it from the predatory Deviants (sort of skinless, sinewy beasts with prehensile tentacles) at the behest of Arishem, ‘the Prime Celestial’. 

‘If you’re lost already, bad luck: there’s plenty more to come, which demands some planet-sized chunks of exposition. At times if feels like you are watching a very sophisticated PowerPoint presentation.’ 

Adding the film was a ‘gigantic exercise in un-realism’, he praised Kumail Nanjiani’s turn as Eternal-turned-Bollywood movie star Kingo, but said Angelina Jolie’s Thena was ‘unconvincing’ portraying a personality disorder.

He wrote:  That’s the problem: there’s just too much going on: it’s all headed towards yet another ‘race against time to stop the really bad thing happening’ climax. It’s not exactly boring – there’s always something new to behold – but nor it is particularly exciting, and it lacks the breezy wit of Marvel’s best movies.’ 

The Telegraph critic Robbie Collin again gave Eternals two stars, writing: ‘The answer is the problem with Eternals in miniature: it’s constantly engaged in a kind of grit-toothed authenticity theatre, going out of its way to show you it’s doing all the things proper cinema does, even though none of them bring any discernible benefit whatsoever to the film at hand. 

‘The more muted tone rules out Marvel’s fast and flippant house style: instead, Eternals opts for solemnity peppered with wackiness, which occasionally gives it the feel of a Japanese anime series.’

He added that Jolie’s character was ‘like a parody’, and wrote: ‘Perhaps the hope was that Marvel’s 26th film might rattle the franchise out of its comfort zone. But the franchise is nothing but comfort zone, which renders its latest entry an instant white elephant.’ 

Empire critic John Nugent gave Eternals three stars, as it was ‘unable to escape the clichés of superhero storytelling’ but praised Zhao’s ‘assured and ambitious’ MCU debut.

He wrote:  ‘There’s a fascinating tension in Eternals between the unstoppable force of the Marvel project and the immovable object of Zhao’s artistic sensibilities. In many ways, this looks and feels nothing like any Chloé Zhao film we’ve seen before

‘And yet in many ways, this film looks and feels nothing like any previous Marvel film. There are, for example, at least a couple of firsts: a genuine sex scene, and an onscreen gay kiss — unheard of in the normally rather chaste MCU. 

‘More frequently, though, it seems to fall into familiar traps about saving the world and learning to work together as a team; when a giant, CGI-heavy battle begins to thwart another potential apocalypse, you start to feel a formula being leaned on.’

BBC Culture critic Nicholas Barber also gave ‘ultimately unmemorable’ Eternals three stars, and said ‘it could be the most disappointing MCU film yet.’   

He wrote: ‘Suffice it to say that the Eternals score highly in terms of gender, ethnic and sexual diversity, but lowly in terms of being memorable. They’re a sketchily drawn and fundamentally drab bunch, so it can be tricky to remember which one is friendly with which. 

‘By rights, their super-soap opera should have had its own 20-part series on Disney+. In a film, the plot is so over-populated that one Eternal even announces, shortly before the climactic battle, that he doesn’t want to be involved, and walks out, leaving us to wonder why exactly we’ve spent the last hour hanging out with him. 

Eternals is adapted from a series of far-out 1970s comics by the great Jack Kirby, and traces remain of his visionary design, but Zhao and her three co-writers have weighed it down with lots of rudimentary dialogue.’                     

Evening Standard critic Charlotte O’Sullivan praised the film and gave it an impressive four stars, heaping praise on the cast, bar Gemma Chan’s ‘wooden’ turn as Sersi.

She wrote: ‘We’re used to top-notch bickering from Marvel but the self-aware, sibling-like rivalry here seems extra divine because it allows ideas explored in Nomadland to be revisited. Maybe we don’t need a ‘true home’ in our lives. Or a ‘boss’.

‘The whole cast are fabulous, with one exception. Chan’s a bit wooden. As far as the script’s concerned, she’s the chosen one. But I wish Zhao hadn’t chosen her. 

‘Anyway, the fights, especially in the film’s last third, are astounding, beautifully paced and crammed with detail. ‘