Ron Howard‘s Eden (Vertical, 8.22) is a total flop, of course. Nobody wants to hang with a few headstrong German contrarians living hand-to-mouth on a remote island in the 1930s. I would have seen it nonetheless, but with all the packing and preparation I couldn’t find the time.
There’s something generally dull and flatliney about solitary survival films set on sandy remote islands…Randall Kleiser‘s The Blue Lagoon, the last third of Ruben Ostlund‘s Triangle of Sadness, Ivan Reitman‘s Six Days Seven Nights, Peter Weir‘s The Mosquito Coast, Stuart Heisler‘s Island of Desire, Michael Powell‘s Age of Consent…stuck there, no escaping, later.
In my book only three such films have “worked” — Robert Zemeckis‘s Cast Away (’00), Ken Annakin‘s Swiss Family Robinson (1960 Disney film) and Nicolas Roeg‘s Castaway (’86).
Agreed, Castaway is a tiny bit dull for a lack of story tension, but I was half-taken with…okay, with Amanda Donohoe‘s nudity. A Cannon release, I wrote the press kit for it. My phone interview with Oliver Reed didn’t go well — I tried not to rub him the wrong way but I said something about his character being a bit of a lazy sod. Things went downhill from there on.
Two anthropologists are captured by cannibals in the region of New Guinea. Chief to anthropologists: “Death or kiki?” Anthropologist #1 chooses kiki and is beaten, tortured, whipped, flayed and eaten alive by crocodiles. The chief asks Anthropologist #2 the same question, and he says, “I’m not a brave man so I’ll choose death.” And the chief goes, “Very well, death…but first, kiki!”