Ron Howard’s Beautiful Mind
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Ron Howard’s passion project is a murder mystery.
Oscar winner Howard (A Beautiful Mind) caught the bug to direct Eden while visiting the Galapagos fifteen years ago.
Here’s the official synopsis:
A group of people fueled by a profound desire for change; in order to turn their back to society, they leave everything behind and set their futures on the harsh landscape of the Galapagos.
The film stars Sydney Sweeney, Jude Law, and Ana de Armas (Blonde) and seems to be a spiritual cousin to Howard's older iconic work and recent fare.
Apollo 13 (1995) also followed a group who left society (temporarily on a rocket) and faced their own harsh landscape (a ruptured spacecraft).
Howard’s latest narrative feature, Thirteen Lives (2022), also dealt with a deadly landscape: a flooded cave in Thailand, which divers braved to rescue a trapped soccer team.
In both 13 projects, Howard employed the real-life astronauts and divers whom the scripts depicted to make his films authentic.
Howard discussed:
"When audiences invest in individual characters, you don’t know what scar tissue they will take away… what it might have been to live through it… we never wanted to sentimentalize this."
What's clear is that Howard's bread and butter is diving into deeply terrifying stories of human potential, whether it be a rescue mission in space or a Thai cave.
What will be interesting about his latest Eden is to see if he can work the same narrative magic into this work of pure fiction.
For More:
Eden is rumored to premiere at Venice.
Apollo 13 trailer.
Thirteen Lives (2022) trailer.