Island Watch: Eden (2025) / The Galapagos Affair - Satan Came to Eden (2013)

Eden (2025)

Watched:  07/25/2026

Format:  Library Disc

Viewing:  First

Director:   Ron Howard

This is a movie about living in a place that's pretty good, but the place suddenly gets overrun by people who read an article saying the place was cool.  Because the people who moved there, wrongly believing themselves cool (and therefore heirs to the cool place), bring their suckiness to the place - the transitive powers of their suckiness, large numbers and insistence on changing the nature of what made the place cool to begin with, make that place which was once cool now suck.  

Eventually the place sucks so much, helped along with the participation of government stooges hoping for money and glamour, things in the place become straight up bleak.  

In short, this is the story of Austin, Texas.

When Eden (2025) was released, reviews were kind of all over the place, but I was curious.  I don't tend to think of Howard as a director who does grittier movies about sordid topics like sex and violence.  The movie had a fascinating cast - Jude Law, Vanessa Kirby, Ana de Armas, Daniel Bruhl, Sydney Sweeney...  A movie requiring minimal FX, and where shit gets very real as people scrape for survival in what is now an infamously inhospitable living.  And turn on each other.

Based, in theory, on real events, I - being me - did not trust the movie in the slightest.  Especially under the eye of Ron Howard, who I think has his issues as a director and storyteller.  Howard isn't going to let some irritating truth get in the way if he's thought of a good cinematic arc or moment.  But when the story gets this small, with only a few people involved and a lot of them end up missing or dead, we're not going to be able to go to Wikipedia and see what really happened.  

What I do think he captured is that the three factions who all wind up on this desolate island in the 1930's, tens of miles across open water from other people, are all there for kind of insane reasons - and that is naturally going to cause conflict.  He seems to have at least told a compelling story I can see as a play.

The cast includes a would-be Nietzschean philosopher (Jude Law) and his disciple/ lover/ work-horse (Vanessa Kirby), a naive family fleeing Hitler's Germany (Bruhl and Sweeney) who believe this will be a romantic tropical paradise,  and - most of all - a woman claiming to be a Baroness (Ana de Armas) and her 2-3 lovers she's brought as manual labor.

While the arrival of the Wittmer's into the philosopher's solitary paradise is unwelcome, the Baroness is a force of nature - with both men and guns to enforce her will.  And she sees this barren rock as the ideal place to build a resort for the ultra-wealthy.  Ie; she's delusional, but through charm and sex has been able to bring along willing participants she hopes will attract more investment and she can just sort of be at the center of it all, letting the imagined riches flow to her.

Meanwhile, Rittmer, the philosopher, is losing his shit with these neighbors while poor Sydney Sweeney is just trying to make living in a cave work.  

Eden was part of my Vanessa Kirby borrowed-from-the-library-DVD viewing

First - Howard is no idiot, and one thing he is able to always do is get great performances out of actors.  I am utterly unfamiliar with Sweeney's work, but based on this, yeah, she's really solid.  Am I shocked Jude Law goes hard?  Or Daniel Bruhl?  No.  Does Vanessa Kirby kill in this?  Yes, she does, as a true believer in the mission who suffers from MS and thinks this may be her cure even as she and Rittmer seem a poor match.  Ana de Armas has the most challenging role as someone who, on paper, seems so absurd, you can't sort out why anyone would follow her to a second location, let alone a tropical island.  But she does sell it - and apparently this is sort of what really happened?

It's an engaging film, absolutely.  As the pieces fall into place and we learn who each person is, the explosion between the parties is more a question of when than if.  It's a study of human nature, and does not come up on the side of "we're all basically good people inside" - especially people who had such disdain for human society they moved to a rock in the middle of the ocean.   

But there are scenes that took me out of the film - namely the entire childbirth sequence - which just became so many things stacked on each other, it's was a hat on a hat on a hat on a hat.  And, frankly, I thought kind of poorly shot in an effort to make it *tense*.  It was here you could almost imagine Howard saying "now we're making a movie!".   And, because it's Ron Howard, sometimes when he thinks something is important, he makes sure to all but stop the movie and have the characters say "and now for some messaging, please listen".  Which, you know, given the rate of media literacy, maybe that's the right thing to do.

What surprised me was that the movie actually provides very pat answers, mixing and matching conflicting stories from the real incident, when it seems like a Rashomon approach might have better served the story and some form of truth.

Arguably, the movie and real-life-events are a petri dish of what many fantasize about and to which we ascribe various political persuasions.  Are we really good at self-sufficiency?  Or do we require the intervention of others?  And what happens in a world without laws when the barest of force disrupts what we set out to do?  Unshockingly, bodies start turning up.

But, dissatisfied with the answers of the film, I immediately put on...

The Galapagos Affair: Satan Came to Eden (2013)

Watched:  07/26/2025

Format:  YouTube

Viewing:  First

Director:  Dan Geller / Dayna Goldfine

(I found the movie here)

Made over what had to have been years and years, this doc tracks the story of what may or may not have happened on the island in question, and - for context - pulls in residents of the nearby island Santa Cruz, which was maybe a bit more livable but still barely an outpost in the 1930's.  Filmed during the digital camera age of the late-90's through what I'm guessing is the 00's, the doc makers interview the children of the Santa Cruz settlers - who are still there - about their families, growing up in such a remote patch.  And, two of the babies born on the island to one of the families in question is still alive and well and shows the cave he was born in.

The doc confirms my suspicions that the residents of the island were perhaps more in touch with people coming by than is suggested - and relied on them a bit for survival.  But also, the timeline of the events stretches over multiple years, not the year or so of the film.

And it's possible what actually went down is more fucked up than the movie thinks - which it tries to tie up with a neat bow.  

What the doc confirms is how completely nuts the situation truly was with the "Baroness" - a woman who never was a Baroness, who was forcing a version of reality into being, kept a passel of male lovers (it seems much more than the 2 in the film), and was generally a real @#$%ing problem.  

The doc basically lays out what the two on-the-record stories were, from Dore (the Kirby character) and from Margert (the Sweeney character), which point the finger at the other for the Baroness's ultimate demise, but admits "man, who can say?"  Which I think, ultimately, is the better call.  And that Rittmer died of food poisoning as an accusation of murder is certainly a big "I dunno.  Maybe?"

Which is all you can really say.  The circumstances are so alien and extreme, it's easy to kind of buy anything.  

What is a little chilling that the doc doesn't really discuss except in elliptical terms is what the people settling the islands were condemning their children to.  An island is not the same as moving someone across the country - no one is making money, really, by showing up on the islands, you're cutting them off from human experience and being able to even function in the outside world.  So maybe it isn't a shock those who were raised there remain there.

Anyway, it's all interesting enough.  Howard stuck close enough to the reality of the events as relayed that it doesn't feel like one need dismiss the movie outright - always nice.  I suspect, because of the bizarre nature of the movie and its basis in real events, I'll think about the movie and the doc down the line.  

Fun fact - in 1995, just before we started dating, Jamie went to the Galapagos.  She didn't watch the movie and wasn't paying attention to the doc as I wrapped it up, but she heard one of the location names and declared "oh, I've been there!" to which I got to inform her "seems that's a crime scene", which I guess they didn't tell the tourists.

and, yes, Kirby is still a biscuit in this movie