“Inspired by the accounts of those who survived” is a juicy way to open a picture, and an immediate reminder that director Ron Howard is aces with narrative tension. That’s evidenced across his eclectic, blockbuster-studded filmography, from the romping actioner Willow and pyro thriller Backdraft to the preposterous Da Vinci Code movies and expertly nailbiting docudramas Apollo 13 and Thirteen Lives. And so it goes in Eden, Howard’s 28th feature film, which boasts a couple moments where you just might forget to breathe.
Scripted by Noah Pink (Tetris), Eden dramatizes the real-life mystery of what happened to the first settlers of Floreana Island, part of the Galápagos. (Documentary The Galapagos Affair: Satan Came to Eden tackled the subject previously in 2013; the story also inspired a 1934 silent film, a 1938 fictionalized novel, and conflicting memoirs from two of the survivors.) The film opens with the islands “Adam and Eve,” German expats and lovers Friedrich Ritter (Law) and Dore Strauch (Kirby), already established on the island. Ritter fancies himself a philosopher and sends home accounts of life on Floreana and his thoughts on how the human race might improve itself, which are published around the world, attracting attention and admirers. That includes the just-arrived Wittmer family – husband Heinz (Brühl), his sickly son (Tittel), and Heinz’s much younger second wife (Sweeney) – who are eager but naive about life on Floreana. Friedrich and Dore are not exactly welcoming about having their privacy trampled on – “everything on this island can kill you,” they darkly warn their new neighbors – but the Wittmers are angels compared to the devilish Baroness (Armas), who washes up with two lovers and a plan to open a luxury hotel for the one-percent. It’s a combustible mix.
The accents wobble some. And the performances, though individually compelling, put altogether sometimes operate in different registers: Law a comic gargoyle, Armas recalling a silver screen siren gone blue, and Sweeney restrained close to blankness until she comes snarlingly alive in the film’s most harrowing sequence. As a contained survivalist story, Eden holds the attention. But it’s never transportive.
“Don’t throw Schopenhauer at me,” Dore snipes during a lover’s spat, a funny moment that nonetheless spotlights the film’s only superficial interest in what makes these settlers and the psychopaths among them tick. The story is rich with potential for modern resonance – rising fascism is what motivates Ritter and Strauch to abandon Germany in the first place – but Howard and Pink never really sink their teeth into it. Eden shows humanity at its worst, but without reflecting much on the why of it all – a Lord of the Flies analogue that concludes not with a gut punch but a tidy historical coda.
