Directed by Ron Howard | Written by Howard and Noah Pink | 129 min | ▲▲▲ | On Prime
An earlier version of this review appeared at the Toronto International Film Festival 2024.
It’s taken awhile for Ron Howard’s survivalist melodrama (written by Haligonian Noah Pink, who also did Tetris) to arrive after it premiered at TIFF last year, but here it is. I was glad to be able to revisit it now on Amazon Prime.
In a career stuffed with blockbuster hits of undeniably mainstream entertainment — highlights including Splash, Apollo 13, and Rush — this is probably Howard’s most unorthodox effort, a picture based on the true story of Germans who, following the economic collapse of 1929, moved to a volcanic isle in the Galapagos to start fresh, following the example of a famed misanthropic doctor and his wife.
That’s Jude Law and Vanessa Kirby, Ritter and Dore. He’s trying to write a manifesto for a new civilization and she’s got MS and a deep affection for her donkey. They’re contemptuous of the new arrivals, the Wittmers: Margret (Sydney Sweeney), her bureaucrat husband, Heinz (Daniel Brühl), and their son, Harry (Jonathan Tittel). But the young family are survivors, willing to work hard on their barren plot and have more children. Following them is a flamboyant, problematic woman, the Baroness (Ana de Armas), and her cadre of male admirers (including Felix Kammerer), who dream of founding a luxury hotel right on the beach to attract the world’s wealthiest clientele.
Pink’s script never lets up, mixing elements of The Mosquito Coast with Lord Of The Flies and any frontier western you’d care to name while never forgetting its key themes — humans take our conceits, our egos, and our jealousies with us when we try to restart civilizations elsewhere. Cinematographer Mathias Herndl shoots the Gold Coast of Australia, standing in for the Galapagos, with all the required golden light and sweaty reality.
The cast is game, especially Sweeney and Law, who shares the full Jude here, if you follow me. Howard’s approach, while not shirking from the requisite violence — and a bloody birth scene with Sweeney that challenges the one she did in Immaculate — is also entirely old school: with the exception of authentic Germans Brühl and Kammerer, his cast of Brits, Cubans, and Americans awkwardly venture Germanic accents and none of them match, too often providing presumably unintended camp to the proceedings. Still, that’s part of the fun of this production, providing a sizzling tension at odds with the grim realism of the actual events.
