Review: Showing humanity at its worst, 'Eden' has gorgeous actors getting uncivilized on a remote island

Ron Howard’s new film “Eden” is a true story about disenchanted Europeans, who, in the 1930s, escaped from their society and decamped on a lonely rock in the Galapagos, only to see their handmade utopia devolve into petty power struggles and murder. It’s also lurid proof that Charles Darwin missed out on the truly juicy survival-of-the-fittest action by about a hundred years.

This is certainly unusual material for a mainstream stalwart like Howard, who knows his way around heroic problem-solving narratives ( “Apollo 13,” the Thai cave rescue movie “Thirteen Lives” ). But in screenwriter Noah Pink’s melodramatic imagining of incidents both well-documented and mysterious, one can see this Hollywood veteran on a mission to loosen the shackles of his reputation and have some nasty, brutis