Éden

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.

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.

More than a little bit like a Lord of the Flies featuring adults. An interesting premise for a film, particularly being based on a true story. A handful of weirdo pre-WW2 Germans findthemselves indulging the hippy life among the isolation of the Galapagos.

Sydney Sweeney is the standout here, breaking out of her typecast, sporting a very decent German accent, and playing a more motherly role rather than the sultry vixen as which she is often cast, with Jude Law putting in a regular showing with his usual commanding screen presence and delivery, while Ana De Armas stands out like a bit of sore thumb, and continues to raise doubts in me whether she can actually properly act at all, but I will give her plenty of credit for being willing to show off her best assets, and, being honest, however she was acting I supposed it did successfully boost my loathing of her as the main antagonist, so I dunno. She just has such a babyface, and such cute cheeks and glowy eyes, I can't take this woman seriously, although she's undeniably sexy.

Learn a bit of obscure history of the Galapagos along the way. 3 good-looking ladies to hold your hand, with Vanessa Kirby in the mix and foxy as always. Learn that being stranded on an island by choice sucks even more than being stranded on one by accident, especially without a volleyball named Wilson.

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 on 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.

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) in the 1930s. It doesn't work out as hoped because, in the end, people are people and they can cooperate together for only so long. Particularly when one person, a seductress, is evil through and through.

This is in many way 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 this group of men and women all went to the island for "pleasure seeking", to escape the world they had lived in, conflicts start to erode relationships."

Good for Howard to bring this story to the screen. The acting is great, especially from de Armas and Sweeney, quite different from earlier roles each played.