I live in a hotel for most of the year. Hotels all come with the standard internet connection: shitty. The available cable channels are only slightly better at crappy. Because of this, I’m behind on Mad Men, Sons of Anarchy and The Vampire Diaries. (That’s actually a lie. I’m very much up to date on The Vampire Diaries.) The worst part is with a bad internet connection I am unable to take advantage of my favorite Netlfix feature: Instant.
Yesterday I returned home to DC after a four month stay in Orange County. It’s good to be back home with my beautiful girlfriend, sorry ladies, and I’ve returned to the best Christmas gift ever: a Roku Digital Video Player.
I plugged that bad boy in this morning. It took about 7 minutes to get through the menu and add some channels and then I was off. I searched through the hundreds of movies in my instant queue to find a movie that I could watch while my girlfriend was at work, somebody’s gotta pay for my beard conditioner.
I chose Franck Vestiel’s Eden Log because it looked like it might be scary. Eden Log is a futuristic French sci-fi thriller from 2008. One of the drawbacks of Netflix instant play is that a lot of foreign films are dubbed. Sadly Eden Log is one of them. The story is a bit confusing but I’m going to retell it and hopefully it makes sense:
A man wakes up half naked, covered in mud and doesn’t know who or where he is. He enters a facility called Eden Log. It is some sort of mining facility. He has entered the worker’s entrance where a digital image of a woman tells him that if he works hard Eden Log will grant him citizenship to the world above. The man meets “The Architect” who is attached to a wall by a plant. The Architect dies. There are sounds in the distance. Those of monsters. The man runs. He encounters guards who are searching for The Architect. The man runs, again. This time he is saved by a botanist in a mask. The botanist explains that Eden Log is a tree that provides power to the world above and that the plant has infected the workers. Now they’re mutants. There has also been a worker’s revolt.
Are you getting bored with this? Because I’m getting tired explaining it. I was a little bored watching too. The film is a combination of several sci-fi films; Soylent Green and The Matrix are the most obvious. Ultimately we discover that the tree’s sap energizes the workers so that they are more physically capable of maintaining the trees health but a side effect of the sap is that they get sick and become mutants. So the company takes the workers and gives them “citizenship.” But what they really do is bring the sick workers up to the surface and hook them back up to the tree which drains the sap from them to feed itself.
The real star of the film is Jean-Philippe Moreaux, the production designer. The film has a great visual look to it. Moreaux is definitely influenced by The City of Lost Children Directors Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro. Both films have a similar industrial look but Eden Log provides a natural integration of a technology and industrial structures with long tree roots enveloping everything.
Eden Log fails to add anything new to the sci-fi genre but I think it was an ambitious film. If only they had spent more time on the script. The film challenged us to wonder how far we would go for energy? In reality we know the consequences of oil usage and yet we fill up our cars every day. Would we protest if our energy was provided to us as a direct result of someone’s life? I’d like to think we would throw our arms up and demand change. But the more I think about it the more I fear we wouldn’t.
