review of ‘Eden’ on Amazon Prime Video

Logic suggested that a film with Jude Law, Ana de Armas, Sydney Sweeney, Vanessa Kirby y Daniel Brühl and directed by the heterogeneous Ron Howard (a wonderful mind, Apollo 13, The challenge. Frost vs. Nixon, The Da Vinci Code, Rush) would arrive, even if it was late, in Spanish cinemas. However, Eden It has been released as a novelty to use on Amazon Prime Video. Things of the times and the platform factor.

Edenpresented at the Toronto Festival in 2024, shows the tensions between the first settlers of Floreana, an island in the Galapagosat the beginning of the 30s. Inspired by real eventshe thriller It draws on conflicting versions about the disputes and deaths that occurred in the place after the German doctor Friedrich Ritter and his partner began to receive visitors and had the Wittmer family and a young baroness as neighbors.

Review of ‘Eden’

If in normal circumstances morality is often suspended, in situations of scarcity and nerves the darkness that drives actions becomes more evident. A classic look present at all times in Eden, story of bad neighborliness and tensions on a remote island that overcomes a not very credible beginning despite its real basis and that it grows in interest throughout the process by the experienced hand of Ron Howard and by the characters.

Eden is not ranked among Howard’s outstanding films, although the director’s solvency and what isolation, lack of resources and the echoes of survival exert they lower the fact of being in front of some transited elements.

The improvementthe turning point, is set in the wake of the intense birth scene that Sydney Sweeney faces single-handedly. without knowing that she is being watched by two neighbors who had gone to steal cans of food from her house and who do not plan to help her. Beyond the fact that the actress’s dedication makes one think about her performance in Inmaculatethis passage shows that The seemingly weakest character is actually the strongest.and also the most prominent.

The attractiveness is shown from the start by the doctor and thinker embodied by Jude Lawthe man who has the radical and crazy idea of, faced with the drift of the world, go to the Galapagos and get away from everything to write an ideology that saves humanity from itself. Although Law, correctly, once again evokes that he is in his interpretive maturity, paradoxically Friedrich Ritter is the most superficially treated role. Its description suffers in the evolution, and not because, as indicated, it loses the compass of its principles, but because its drift is essentially due to the fact that the path of the story demands it.

Dore Strauch, the role played by Vanessa KirbyRitter’s partner, a deep admirer of his work, gains strength in development. Daniel Brühlthe man who takes his family to the island, moved by Ritter’s example and who encounters his rejection, has a character who says little but who nevertheless turns out to be correct and not superfluous. Heinz Wittmer and Margret, his wife (Sweeney), represent the tenacity and endurance in the face of adversity and the home built from scratch with enormous sacrifice.

Ana de Armas has a good time as the baroness who moves there with two submissive and smitten lovers with the intention of building a luxury hotel. Manipulator textbook, constitutes the destabilizing element of Floreana. As intoxicating as it is hateful, it responds to archetype of the woman who intoxicates and deceives and always gets what she wants.

Howard and screenwriter Noah Pink opt for narrative boundaries, and they do well because of what it conveys and activates the situation on the island. However, Eden He also asked for a greater reflection of the outside in relation to the impact of Ritter’s postulates in Europe and the United States, which would have given them more dimension.

In that way, Howard could have had more influence on the documentary forms with which he fleetingly flirts (the black and white filming) on ​​the occasion of the visit of the wealthy explorer played by Richard Roxburgh. In the same way, the exhibition of natural places is based more than necessary on the images of native iguanas, in any case with their symbolism by highlighting the wild and exotic.