Connianatu
How wonderful it is to see this fine actress carry a film and carry it so beautifully.
Tayyab Torres
Strong acting helps the film overcome an uncertain premise and create characters that hold our attention absolutely.
Married Baby
Just intense enough to provide a much-needed diversion, just lightweight enough to make you forget about it soon after it’s over. It’s not exactly “good,” per se, but it does what it sets out to do in terms of putting us on edge, which makes it … successful?
Celia
A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.
Ben Larson
I watched a film earlier today where I knew who the villain was and why. This is the complete opposite. A man (Clovis Cornillac - The Unbearable Lightness of Being) awakens underground with no memory. You know the same as he does. You both embark on a deep dark journey of discovery in a post apocalyptic world.This is not everyone's cup of tea. It will likely require more than one viewing to fully grasp, and that is more than all but the tiny few would be willing to endure.It has a mutant monster and a strange ending, but sci-fi/horror junkies should find it interesting.
lemon_magic
I'll give "Eden Log" credit - the visuals and sound design for this movie are amazing. They create an immersive experience of collapse, chaos, dread, paranoia and confusion that goes a long way on the strength of pancake mud makeup, gloomy lighting, color filters, netting and plastic curtains.Problem: I wish the screenplay didn't to resort to the threadbare plot device of having the protagonist wake up with a case of amnesia - amnesia as a way to preserve the central mystery of the movie has been done to death in everything from "Resident Evil" to "Pandorum" in the last few years.Another problem: I saw the movie on DVD with dubbed English, so it's possible that I missed some verbal cues and some French language context that would have helped the story make more sense. I watch a lot of chewy, difficult movies and I often have the endings of movies figured out 10 minutes after the story begins, and I paid close attention, and I still missed the meaning of some of the plot developments. I finally caught on thanks to the IMDb message boards, but it should not have been necessary.Last, the movie is essentially a parable and a warning about certain aspects of society and the human condition, and is quite heavy handed in the way it delivers its central message. The characters are complete blank ciphers. You can practically see the "message coming in for you, Sir!" arrows zinging off the screen and at your eyeballs. If I want to be beaten over the head with anti-Military/Industrial/consumerist messages, I'll rewatch "Metropolis", which did it better decades ago.Still, this was worth watching at least once just for the visuals and the soundtrack.
davidfurlotte
My theory is that the writer of this...story ate some magic mushrooms and then sat down and wrote the script. IF the intended audience were to consume some 'shrooms before watching this, everything would make sense.I don't know, maybe I'm old fashioned. I kinda like a movie to have some kind of plot, a storyline, characters that I either like, hate or have some kind of feeling for what happens to them. These are all things that I think are good things and are nowhere to be seen in this movie. I don't want to watch a movie where I have to now pretend I'm in one of my film classes from college and have to write a treatise about it because it's a THINKER film. Do not let anyone confuse you and say that if you were intelligent the film makes perfect sense, it does not. However, I honestly do believe that after viewing this...movie, my I.Q. lowered and I really should have done what I was asked to do and simply switched it off after the first 15 minutes, but I kept watching it in the vain hope it was going to suddenly make sense of everything.To put it plainly, it could be taking place on Earth or an Alien planet, it could be in our far distant future or it may be something out of a parallel universe. I think basically it was written by a kid who discovered that he could make a light bulb glow with a potato and took it a few steps further.Either way, save some time in your life and give this flick a pass if it shows up near you. Unless you want to test my theory.
sddavis63
This is a very strange movie - a pretty good one; don't get me wrong; but a strange one. As it begins, an unnamed man with no memory awakens in what can only be described as hell. We watch him explore this place, desperately searching for a way out, and we, too, face the same question he's facing - what is this place? And - of course - how did this guy come to be here? The mystery surrounding the environment, which is very dark and claustrophobic, is a pretty good one. Over the course of the movie, I took 3 guesses as to what was happening. My first was that this was some sort of scientific experiment run amok - this was suggested by repeated references to labs. My second was that we were seeing the desperate aftermath of a nuclear holocaust, which was suggested by the scenes of extreme devastation we see. My third was that this was some sort of religious fable, which was suggested by the opening reference to the Creation narrative in Genesis (although the movie as a whole really seemed to have more in common with the Book of Revelation.) In the end, the movie doesn't really answer those question or give a straightforward explanation of what's been going on, although I thought that a combination of my first and third scenarios seemed most likely.To me - it seemed as if the movie was making the suggestion that the creation of humanity was caused by some sort of "divine" lab experiment that didn't work, with the unnamed man (and the woman he encountered) being loosely cast as Adam and Eve awakening to the desperate realities of their condition. The title "Eden Log" then suggests that this is a sort of account of how and why "Eden" (in the Genesis narrative) came to be. This was reinforced for me by the end of the movie, which seemed to reference something of the Judeo-Christian narrative - that from this point on (the point at which the man emerges from the earth, just as Genesis portrays Adam as being brought forth from the earth) the goal of the man (and his creators, whoever they were) is to find a way to return them to their original state, which surely must have been better than the hellish state we saw in this movie. Maybe I'm reading too much into this, but that seemed to be the only explanation that made sense to me. So, I found it an interesting reflection on and recreation of creation itself.