Eden Log (2009)

Waste of time

Although it has its amusing moments, in eneral the plot does not convince.

It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

I feel like somebody dropped a log, that's for sure, and then they or somebody else filmed it.I only made it to 20 minutes in. Is that good?Rookie, rookie film making. Folks - you need to stand back and look at WHAT exactly is being seen and heard. All there is for the whole first chunk of the film - and it makes you not care what there is in the rest of it - is grunting, a flashing white light, mud, more grunting, and some inexplicable, unintelligible computer voices - oh yeah and then more mud and grunting.Aaaand it's BACK TO FILM SCHOOL YOU GO!

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.

I really wanted to like this movie. However it becomes boring and annoying to keep trying to make sense of stuff.The movie starts out dark and gloomy. You really want to know what is happening. Problem is, it takes ages before answers come. With ages I mean the last 10 minutes of the movie. Until that time it crawls along at a mindboggering speed. I wished I fast-forwarded this movie, actually it is possible since there is almost no dialog! After a long watch looking at more and more darkness and the guy passing out a couple of times, I lost interest in this movie. They try to regain that by some weird rape-scene. Why? No one knows.At the end the situation becomes clearer, but you get the sense this is all just too vague. The movies fails at keeping the audience interested so most people can't really care about the tree and the story around it. They are just glad it's over. I know I was!

There is a lot to like about this film, particularly the first half of it. Like pretty much all films of the "I just woke up here alone" genre, it's thoughtful and captivating. And it moves nicely into the "yet another zombie movie" genre that these things tend to turn into. But the style and the focus are very, very good. This film deserves to be recognized for that, if nothing else. I also liked that, even though you saw the man's identity coming, it was still satisfying when it was revealed.There were some things I didn't like: (1) The pacing, particularly in the second half, is dreadfully slow, and for no good reason.(2) Many, many, many questions are left unanswered. Why is this man biologically special? If the tree roots feed on humans, why do we need to hang humans in boxes from the branches? What is turning humans into these monsters? Why is level -1 so much higher up from level -2 than any of the other levels were apart? Who is the guy who appeared to be integrated into the wall, and how did he think he was sabotaging things? Why would someone so willingly let himself be experimented on by a stranger wearing a mask? How did he get unclothed in the mud? Why bother with an apparently irrelevant religious quote at the start? What good did growing the tree at the end do? (3) Ultimately, after sitting through a reasonably good zombie mystery, it's incredibly annoying for the payoff to be a lecture on energy use and the world's indigenous poor people. It's not the point of view I have trouble with, but the heavy-handed way it was narrated to us in the last few scenes on level 0. Avatar is a much better example of how to get across a message without being lecturing.