At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

There are moments that feel comical, some horrific, and some downright inspiring but the tonal shifts hardly matter as the end results come to a film that's perfect for this time.

Close shines in drama with strong language, adult themes.

Eden Log is a gritty visceral vision shot in underground caves, creating a very immersing and believable subterranean environment thanks to brilliant set design, cinematography and sound design. Unfortunately, narrative development is a arduous affair, with little emotional connection or character development and this renders it short of any real lasting impact.Conceptually, it is dark and creative, exploring mankind's ruthless pursuit of energy and development. Nevertheless, it explores this idea with little depth; more a brief snapshot of an idea that is revealed at the end, which because of the lack of connection with the main (nearly the only) character, the view is left a little unsatisfied. It has the feel of a short made into a feature.Overall, the film's strengths are its cinematography, set/creature design, and eerie use of minimal ambient sound. It unfolds with careful precision, which is almost too sterile and obvious at times, but does, ultimately, lead to an inspired conclusion which has a Darren Aronofsky's 'The Fountain'esque feel to it.Be patient and open minded.

The first thing that must be said is that this is science fiction, not science fantasy. If you are looking for light and easy escapist fair, give this a big miss.This is not an easily accessible movie, its a movie where you, like the protagonist, are constantly trying to put fragmentary pieces together into a coherent story. Your struggle in your seat to understand what you are seeing parallels his struggles both to understand and to escape. This makes it a very powerful movie but not an easy movie to watch.The film-making here is just top-notch. Done in a muted almost black- and-white pallet it feels brooding and claustrophobic. All of the camera wok is hand-held, but don't worry if "Blair Witch" or "Cloverfield" made you ill, this is mostly steadicam work and thus much less shaky.When the french do science fiction, it always has a strong sense of style and this film certainly qualifies. In this case the style is organic mixed with decaying technology. Sort of Alien-esque in the depths of the earth. The feeling of entombed-ness actually makes it more claustrophobic then Alien was.As many others have commented, something about the film-making ends up "feeling" much like a video game, but this isn't necessarily a bad thing for a generation who has grown up on this kind of story-telling. While it may feel a touch unnatural to some of us older folks, I suspect it works well for its primary audience.All in all, this is a fine movie with a bit of a relevant social allegory to it. You may not understand absolutely everything that you see, but if you are willing to work at it a bit, it will heavily engage you and leave you with things to think about.

Watch this movie. I am laughing as I type this, as it has been a VERY long time since I have seen a film so awful. Seriously, it's awesome how bad it was! Mystery Science Theater unfortunately couldn't even use it though, since there are not enough "actual scenes" to comment on. And please ignore all the "People with low IQ's will hate this movie" comments. Realistically, it's more like people with IQ's ranging from 100 - 110, will somehow find a way to appreciate this film, in an attempt to appear more intelligent.I don't need a big-budget film to be entertained! And ironically, the low budget had nothing to do with this film sucking. Well, unless they spent the money allotted for a script on candy for the crew.But I don't think so. I think this is perfection, and exactly what they intended. I mean, the premise is good, right? But it's like a choose-your-own-adventure book, where after the opening page, there's only one choice, and it's the one where you die.Anyhow, I just HAD to write something about this movie, as I am still in shock, and still laughing too. I think this movie should win all the Oscars, in every category. It is 100% perfectly bad. And THAT is a film-making achievement!

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.