‘The Eternaut’ Review: A Landmark Argentine Adaptation Finally Comes Alive

Is it possible?” The question that closes the graphic novel El Eternauta could just as easily be applied to the challenge of adapting it for the screen. Is it possible to turn Héctor Germán Oesterheld and Francisco Solano López’s canonical work into a series capable of capturing its narrative ambition, its philosophical depth, its ethical dilemmas, and its technological complexity? That lingering “is it possible?” has echoed through Argentina’s battered audiovisual industry for decades now, as project after project—across different formats, creators, and production companies—has run headlong into a challenge that seemed unmanageable and fallen along the way. Much like the characters in the story itself, someone had to step up and face the monster, confront the beast, tame the dragon. And today, nearly seventy years after Oesterheld first began publishing his three weekly pages in the magazine Hora Cero, El Eternauta is finally here. And it looks remarkably like what so many once dreamed of seeing.

From the very first moments, it becomes clear that it was possible—that the ambitious universe imagined by Oesterheld has come alive on screen. The opening scene does not appear in the comic, but it bears its unmistakable imprint: three young women talk aboard a sailboat, adrift on the river. In the background, the lights of Buenos Aires suddenly go dark, as if the city had been swallowed by a blackout. A chill runs down the spine. The Eternaut has barely begun, and its first major problem is already solved: the drawings have made the leap to the screen; the story is alive, breathing, moving. That rare kind of miracle an adaptation needs in order not to become dead weight has occurred. And every scene that follows confirms it. This is a series that breathes truth, humanity, tension, and suspense—and that never lets its epic ambition trample its soul, its heart. There may be many changes, but the essence is intact.

To adapt is to alter and modify, not to betray. The series succeeds because it understands the hard core of the story and recognizes that scenes can be shifted, characters altered, elements added or removed, without conceptually damaging the heart of the work or its dramatic weight. What matters most—the struggle initiated by a group of ordinary men trapped inside a house in the northern outskirts of Greater Buenos Aires during a deadly snowfall, who decide to venture outside and confront whatever is happening—remains untouched. And some of the changes—particularly those related to the characters’ ages and the circumstances that follow from that—do more than add historical weight: they enrich and complicate the original premise. The fact that Oesterheld did not imagine them does not invalidate them. The comic is the Bible from which everything begins, but fundamentalism serves no one.

The following paragraphs contain SPOILERS for the first two episodes

Juan Salvo (Ricardo Darín) and his friends Favalli (César Troncoso), Lucas (Marcelo Subiotto), and Polsky (Claudio Martínez Bel) get together to play cards, as they do every Friday, at Favalli’s house in Olivos. They are joined by a relative of Polsky’s, a younger man named Omar (Ariel Staltari), and by Ana (Andrea Pietra), Favalli’s wife. While the men joke, drink whisky, and play cards in the basement, chaos breaks loose upstairs: the power goes out and, in the middle of summer, it begins to snow. Soon they discover that the snow is deadly. People collapse in the street, cars crash, nothing seems to work. They board up the windows and barricade themselves inside. But it will not be enough. Various urgencies force them to leave. Polsky takes no precautions, rushes outside, and dies after just a few steps. Juan Salvo is tempted to do the same. He believes his daughter Clara (Mora Fisz) is with his ex-wife Elena (Carla Peterson) and feels compelled to go find her. But he will have to protect himself from the snow to do so.

This is only the beginning—the point of departure—of the first of six episodes in El Eternauta, a Netflix series whose first season covers less than half of the original story. Purists will immediately spot the changes: the house belongs to someone else, family configurations are different, the story takes place in the present, and the characters are older. None of this matters. On the contrary, given the trajectory the characters follow throughout the season, these decisions feel more than appropriate. Two changes, in particular, are especially welcome. One concerns the protagonist’s objective: here, Salvo ventures outside to find his teenage daughter, whereas in the comic she is a small child who barely leaves the house and whose role—like Elena’s—is largely decorative. The separation gives Salvo’s journey a different axis. It is no longer about returning to an immaculate 1950s home, but about trying to reconfigure one today.

The other major difference is age. Juan Salvo is over sixty, and throughout his journey he experiences confusing, paralyzing flashbacks that we soon understand belong to the Malvinas War, which he survived and which clearly left him traumatized. This backstory not only gives Salvo a personal fear to overcome, but also justifies his familiarity with weapons and his fraught relationship with snow—a phenomenon virtually unknown in Buenos Aires. The characters’ age also reinforces, metaphorically, another idea introduced here: “Old things still work.” Traditional mechanical technologies have not been affected by the mysterious attack that begins with the snowfall. In their own way, the protagonists are part of that logic as well. Experience becomes their source of wisdom.

Favalli, skilled at solving practical and electronic problems, is the one who comes up with solutions: the mask, the clothing, the electromagnetic puzzles. But he is also the first to cross into one of the story’s sharpest thematic territories: that of the combative, distrustful man who has armed himself to the teeth for the end of the world, someone who watches “too many apocalyptic series” and would rather scare others away because he assumes they have bad intentions—including neighbors he has “known his whole life.” Salvo is more ambiguous, wavering between both positions. And once he ventures outside—dealing with the snow, other survivors, and later, in Elena’s apartment building, with literal neighbors at war—he will have to learn how to live with that ambiguity. “No one survives alone,” proclaims the series’ slogan, but that realization will take time. At first, almost everyone looks like an enemy. Even when they are not.

As the episodes progress, this urban conflict expands through a series of sequences set in different locations—an apartment building, a pharmacy, a church, a shopping mall—none of which appear in Oesterheld’s text, and all of which serve to deepen the sense of social collapse triggered by a situation that recalls, in many ways, the pandemic, a world war, or a climate catastrophe. Acts of solidarity emerge alongside selfishness and cruelty, both outside the house and within it. Ana and Elena are the group’s most humanist voices, while Juan, Favalli, and Omar exist in a constant state of tension. That internal wartime atmosphere, less explicit in the 1950s comic, feels far more relevant today, shaped by an era defined by extreme individualism.

It is not that the years in which Oesterheld wrote El Eternauta were idyllic. World War II had ended only recently, the Cold War was spreading and bringing increasingly dangerous nuclear tests and, closer to home, the bombing of Plaza de Mayo had taken place just two years earlier; Peronism was outlawed, and the José León Suárez executions were only months in the past. Social distrust already existed. But in the comic it would fully crystallize only with the arrival of the “robot-men.” In the series, that distrust is already embedded from the outset: a fractured social fabric involving not only a child (the iconic “Pablo,” whose characteristics are altered here), but also building residents—and, in more than one sense, the protagonists themselves.

WARNING: SPOILERS up to Episode Four

Beyond the narrative, the adaptation faced a challenge that seemed even more daunting: the hard science-fiction machinery at the core of El Eternauta. This is not a simple post-apocalyptic survival story à la Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. It is a full-fledged alien invasion, closer to War of the Worlds, complete with gigantic creatures, military-style confrontations, and a sustained mystery surrounding both the form and the purpose of the invasion. In the second half of the season, the series begins to introduce this central element—so crucial to the original comic and so foreign to Argentine audiovisual production, which has virtually no precedent in the genre. While it is true that the biggest challenges have been deferred to the second season, the series does present the first concrete enemies: no longer just the snow or the jittery neighbors, but the “bugs,” those gigantic, violent beetle-like creatures that confirm this is neither a human conflict nor a technological world war. It is an extraterrestrial invasion.

The how and the when are best left unspoiled. What matters is that the purely technical challenge of bringing this to the screen has been more than met. At the same time, Bruno Stagnaro and his team wisely choose to keep it somewhat in the background. Turning The Eternaut into a series of street battles between humans and creatures might be technically impressive, but it would also risk becoming predictable and repetitive, like so many Hollywood films and series. One of Oesterheld’s defining traits was his insistence on localizing the story—naming streets, brands, advertisements, and typically porteño jokes. Some remain unchanged, others have evolved. The series remains faithful to that grounded, everyday perspective of a grand narrative.

That does not mean El Eternauta is not canonical science fiction. Both the comic and the series manage to fuse classic adventure storytelling with a deeper exploration that incorporates Argentina’s recent past and the particular traits of its people. There is something distinctly “held together with wire” about the way Salvo, Favalli, and the others operate—a kind of national signature. A country full of people accustomed to making do in times of crisis, ordinary men who become heroic through ingenuity and practical problem-solving. That said, viewers expecting a massive arrival of extraterrestrial creatures—those familiar with the comic know exactly what that implies—will have to wait until the next season.

The technical challenge of The Eternaut does not lie solely in creating the cascarudos or other fearsome figures yet to appear, but is visible in nearly every frame: the abandoned, snow-covered streets of Olivos, Florida, and Vicente López; neighborhoods like Saavedra and Belgrano; bodies scattered across the asphalt; overturned cars and shattered buses; ruined buildings; enigmatic skies filled with indecipherable movements and colors. Across nearly two thousand effects shots, the series constructs a world that must feel credible for the human story of survival, resilience, and rebellion to carry emotional weight.

Unlike the graphic novel, the series does not open with the scene that directly introduces the concept of time travel implied by the title El Eternauta itself. Instead, this idea emerges gradually and quietly, woven into the narrative in ways that are not immediately recognizable, but that slowly make room for a concept that is central to the story—less narratively than philosophically. The series layers its most fantastical elements gently, beginning in the everyday and moving toward two axes intrinsic to science fiction: alternative understandings of time and space. Keeping that aspect shrouded in mystery works within the same layered structure as the rest of the story. The viewer connects through realism and, before realizing it, has crossed fully into the realm of the fantastic.

The series has its flaws—Episodes Two and Five linger too long on specific situations, and the geographic and narrative progression occasionally takes unnecessary detours—but these are minor issues within an enormous production that never sacrifices the story’s human core. It is a striking, visually spectacular series that makes clear it has an author behind it, someone offering a personal reading of Oesterheld’s text. El Eternauta is faithful both to the essence of the comic and to Stagnaro’s own body of work, something evident to anyone familiar with Pizza, Birra, Faso, Okupas, Un Gallo Para Esculapio, or even his short film Guarisove. The camaraderie among the characters—and the conflicts that arise between them—reflect a reading rooted in the street, in everyday life, in ordinary people who suddenly discover that the world they knew no longer exists. And that what they call the future may be nothing more than an illusion created by a time traveler.