Review of Eden Log

Eden Log (2007)
7/10
It's Mysterious; It's Suspenseful; It's Interesting - But What Is It?
23 March 2010
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.
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