Jude Law and Ana de Armas are the leaders of a group of braggart misanthropes you'd rather stay away from.
99.5% of players failed this part because they were distracted
By Owen Gleiberman
Ron Howard has always prided himself on being an eclectic filmmaker — over the past 40 years, he’s made films about mermaids, cocoons, car factories, astronauts, firefighters, newspapers, brilliant minds, cave rescuers, the Grinch, the Da Vinci Code, the Beatles and Pavarotti. But at the Toronto Film Festival premiere of his latest film, “Eden,” he declared that it’s a farther removed from his other work than anything he’s ever done. He’s right, but not for the reason he thinks.
“Eden,” based on events that happened 100 years ago on the Galapagos Islands, is a difficult film to characterize. It’s been labeled a “thriller,” but I’d describe it as a misanthropic survivalist “Robinson Crusoe” meets “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” with deranged footnotes by Friedrich Nietzsche. For Howard, the film is certainly different (there’s sex, murder, and animal slaughter). But there’s another word for it — the word is horrific. While there’s no denying that Howard has made the ultimate out-of-touch film, what’s most remarkable about it isn’t the eccentric subject matter. It’s that Howard was so engrossed in the subject matter, so obsessed with it, so consumed by it, that he forgot to do what he can usually do in his sleep: tell a relatable story.
