Eden

A great story, great cast and performances.

A good movie is a movie that makes you want to watch more, think more, understand more. This is one of those.

The characters are based on real people and real events yet it feels like getting introduced to those events first hands.

Obviously there is quite a lot of over-dramatization but it serves the story well.

Watch advice: Recommended.

I went into this movie blind, it was a Monday Mystery Movie at Regal.

It's a philosophical journey of the human condition and the troubles that we have with each other. As the story unfolds you could definitely find something in it that resonates with the way you see the world. Finding out that this was based on a true story makes me want to read the two perspectives of what happened on the island. Not a bad movie, I think the critics might have been too critical of the movie.

Set in the Galápagos Islands, but filmed in Australia.

I was able to see the press conference that Ron Howard and the four main stars gave. Howard explained that he had the project in mind for a time, worked on it some during the recent COVID pandemic and lockdowns. He knew it would not be a project that a typical studio would go for so he went at it his way.

The movie is a fictional drama based on real people and their attempt to find their own Eden in the Galápagos Islands (filmed in Australia). It doesn't work out as hoped because, in the end, people are people and they can cooperate together for only so long.

This is analogous to the theme that played out in the year 2000 movie, "The Beach" with Leo Dicaprio. As I wrote in my comments for that one, "Even though these 20 or 30 men and women all went to the island for "pleasure seeking", ultimately roles need to be taken, duties accepted, not everyone agrees, jealousy starts to erode relationships, certain people seek power, and when some get seriously injured, "out of sight, out of mind" is the remedy so as not to upset "paradise." In other words, they end up creating on a smaller scale the same world that they sought to escape from. Eventually this "house of cards" starts to fall down, and ultimately everyone realizes paradise is internal, not some idyllic place."

Good for Howard to bring this story to the screen.

An uninhabited island in the Galápagos is paradise and hell at the same time for a trio of couples who settled there in 1929. At one of the remotest areas on earth there is a clash of personalities; philosophical, libertine, and practical. While one couple seeks solitude, another wants to build a luxury hotel, and the third desires a nourishing place for family. As bugs and boars bite hard, and food and water become as scarce as doctors, police, and dentists, each couple is in for a shock. Darwin would be pleased, for on the island that gave him his fame it is survival of fittest all over again.

In this true story it is intriguing to see the starkly different personalities battle it out like in a miniature world. Ron Howard who was present at this screening at the Toronto International Film Festival, was captivated by the zany stories of the characters, and the good and bad of each of them. If anything, he said, he had to dial the antics back. It is hard to choose a side. Jude Law and the other actors are capable and convincing. Hans Zimmer orchestrated the playlist. How many soundtracks can one person do? I wish there was a little more depth to the dialogue, but Eden is a pleasure to watch and contemplate.

Ron Howard is never afraid to explore new genres and here he definitely immerses you in the social experiment of posh post-war expats trying to make a way of life an island in the Galapagos. Unfortunately the vision of Dr. Ritter and his wife Sue Storm as well as the machinations of the Baroness along with the stresses of the environment prove too much for the bourgeois marriage of Margaret Wittmer (cutie Sydney again!) and her husband Daniel Bruhl. Still, the cast is gorgeous, the island indeed like a paradise from another era, and Howard reiterates yet again a lesson learned by every wannabe Robinson Crusoe and Hemingway in the 1920's: just find your favorite cafe in Paris, spend six weeks writing a novel about your friends which when they read will have them hating your guts, then thirty years later move to Cuba and create your own Eden. Those are your and my happy days.