It’s quite unusual for a film made by a director of Ron Howard’s fame and starring a cast like Eden’s to struggle to find a distributor, but that is indeed what happened with this film. It tells the infamous tale of what happened to the European settlers on the remote Floreana Island in the Galapagos in between the first and second world wars.
Jude Law and Vanessa Kirby star as the original settlers – a German doctor and his wife looking to escape the rise of fascism – and they are quickly joined by Sydney Sweeney and Daniel Bruehl who bring their son with them. This provokes some tension but nothing compare with what happens when Ana de Armas (as an Austrian baroness) and her entourage arrive with the intention of building a luxury hotel. While the film is not great (the de Armas character is ludicrous, and there are some Far and Away-style unintentional moments of hilarity) I don’t really understand why it got quite the critical mauling that it did.
Hans Zimmer has scored most of Howard’s films since The Da Vinci Code in 2006. Several of these have been pretty big, showy scores – Eden is very much not that. The film itself is truly grim, depicting the worst of humanity – people who move away from it all thinking they’re heading to paradise, only to descend into depravity – the music very much reflects this.
There is a gloomy atmosphere from start to finish in the score (which I have to say is very effective in context). There is a central theme for Sweeney’s character – Zimmer introduces this at the start, it’s heard at the end in a similar form – and in between he throws it through all sorts of variations, including several very dark ones. A subtler theme is also regularly heard, representing mystery and darkness.
He (rightly) makes no attempt to reflect the exotic location in the score, remaining focused on the people instead. The ensemble features some vocals (in “The Baroness”, there’s an impressively black humour in the way he builds a conversation between them and the plucked cello), strings and percussion augmented by electronics – very occasionally there is a hint of the more ethereal parts of The Creator, but don’t expect any of that score’s histrionics.
Indeed, most of the score really is very bleak. For the most part Zimmer takes a languorous approach, evoking a sense of a slow descent towards madness. There is one moment where this becomes particularly intense (“Cabin Raid”, which could come from a horror movie). In the second half of the score the composer introduces some low-end crashing pianos (which inevitably recall another composer who often worked with Ron Howard) and these add even more to the tension. But there is beauty sprinkled occasionally amongst all this – the sheer elegance of “Beneath the Finery” summing that up nicely. The score doesn’t shy away from emotion, either – there is often a sense of real human sadness permeating through everything.
There’s something strangely compelling about this album – it’s dark, it deliberately avoids expressing any real sense of hope, it doesn’t even have a nice rousing conclusion – but it works as such a vivid musical portrait of despair. Will I listen to it all that often? Probably not. That’s because it’s so effective at what Zimmer wants it to do. Tempting as it is to compare it with Blitz – and in terms of the sound palette, there is something there – there seems to me to be a lot more depth to this score.
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