Ron Howard
Eden

Today I’ll steal the usual 10 minutes of your time to describe what embodies the classic flop. It’s best to say right away that in my opinion it’s justified, since a story that had some decent potential was simply not told well. Ron Howard is the director of “Eden”: a psychological thriller whose plot is loosely inspired by a story that took place between the late 1920s and early 1930s. The events unfold on the most remote island of the Galapagos archipelago, located 1000 km off the western coast of Ecuador. A piece of land that at the time was completely untouched, populated only by animals and vegetation.

In the film adaptation, a tormented philosopher flees from a decaying, dark Europe, which, gripped by the first winds of global economic crisis and dictatorship, has become, for him and his partner, simply unlivable. After a long wandering journey, the couple finally finds their place on this island at the edge of the world, and the project to write a monumental, essential philosophical work takes shape: the text will be so powerful and disruptive that it will make a new beginning for humanity possible. Occasionally, fishing boats pass by the island, bringing mail and serving as a link with the civilized world. It will be the fame of this undertaking, stoked by resounding newspaper articles, that will make the apparently stable situation start to shift.

The first stone to ripple the peaceful mirror of water is the arrival of an apparently fragile German couple with their child. The second element of disruption comes with the arrival of an exuberant noblewoman accompanied by her slave-suitors. The “baroness”, excited by this new world, has decided that she wants to build a luxury hotel from scratch and is convinced that her force of will alone is enough to make it happen.

Without dragging this out any further—the film doesn’t deserve it—the initially chilly cohabitation degenerates in a predictable crescendo.

Granted that the screenplay was romanticized, what I did not like were the excesses. Some scenes, like the childbirth scene, are so caricatured and exaggerated that, even though they are very gruesome and realistic, they border on ridiculous and undermine the credibility of the story. Some characters are well crafted, such as the second couple of settlers (Daniel Brühl in particular compared to an honest Sydney Sweeney). Vanessa Kirby manages to inhabit the role of the philosopher’s partner (Jude Law) and embodies her growing disappointment. The failure of the project in which she had placed all the hopes of her life takes hold of her, and we can perceive this in her powerful and desperate expressions. The role of the baroness, poorly interpreted by Ana de Armas, is sometimes embarrassing and completely off-key. It really feels like a bad stage play.

I did not appreciate the excessive use of contrast with the unspoiled natural beauty. Maybe the message was meant to be that mankind has an innate ability to ruin everything, even the purest things, with his mere presence, but for me the use of color was too gaudy. We are at the equator and yet sometimes it looks like Scandinavia. Occasionally the director presents us with images of flora and fauna that are completely out of context and end in themselves, however aesthetically pleasing they might be.

Ultimately, I find this to be a confused and decidedly too long work. If it aimed to be a thriller, it is overly caricatured and predictable; if it wanted to be a philosophical work, the message it conveys is, generously speaking, confused and far too faint. The screenplay turns a botanist into a philosopher to add more appeal to a plot with no real tension, and embroiders the narrative development on the basis of the two antithetical versions left by some survivors.

Even though technically it is a well-made film—not unwatchable or annoying, and partly even well-acted—I find that it leaves very little with the viewer after watching. A pity, because there were all the right elements to create a much better product. I realize this last sentence doesn’t mean much, so let me elaborate. If the director wanted to make it a thriller, then he should have leaned more heavily on the soundtrack; he should have made us enter more deeply into the psyche of these people who, after leaving everything behind, realized they had found themselves in the middle of nowhere. They regretted what they had done, and the result is that they exploded. Instead, everything is so restrained and muffled that it feels fake, like a papier-mâché set.

N.B. The film suffered a direct loss of over 30 million dollars.