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Lizards in Movies   Eden (2024)   Spoiler Alert ! Some of these pictures and descriptions may give away plot details that you might not want to know before watching the film.   The IMDB Storyline comments give a good description of this film: "From Academy Award-winning director Ron Howard, Eden unravels the shocking true story of a group of disillusioned outsiders (Jude Law, Ana de Armas, Vanessa Kirby, Daniel Brühl, and Sydney Sweeney) who abandon modern society in search of a new beginning. Settling on a remote, uninhabited island, their utopian dream quickly unravels as they discover that the greatest threat isn't the brutal climate or deadly wildlife, but each other. What follows is a chilling descent into chaos where tensions spiral, desperation takes hold, and a twisted power struggle leads to betrayal, violence, and the deaths of half the colony." It's based on a group of Europeans who tried to inhabit Floreana Island in the Galapagos in the late 1920s and 1930s, including Frederick Ritter, a German doctor who wanted to live in an isolated paradise where he could write a book on theosophist philosophy. In the film, we see lots of shots of Marine Iguanas, a lizard only found on the Galapagos islands that, unlike any other lizard, can dive into the ocean to feed on algae. We see the large lizards on rocks with waves crashing on them, we see them swimming in the water, we see one captured by an eagle, and we see a man carrying one on his back into his house where he cuts it up and feeds it to his wife and their houseguest. Most of the movie was filmed in Australia, but a film unit was also sent to Floreana to film the island and its wildlife including the Marine Iguanas. However, I'm sure that the captured iguana that was eaten was a prop, not a real lizard. Still, it's nice to see them featured in a fiction film instead of just in a nature documentary, even if all the shots of them were just B-roll. I'm not sure if the shot of the eagle catching an iguana is real or CGI. I was curious to find out if Frederick Ritter and the other settlers on Floriana Island featured in the movie really did eat marine iguanas so I searched Dore Strauch's (Vanessa Kirby) memoir "Satan Came to Eden" which she wrote after leaving the island. On page 113 she reports that some island visitors had to eat reptile meat and plants to keep from starving, though it's not clear if they were the people shown in the movie: "Their feet were in a fearful state, their shoes having been torn to shreds by the sharp lava. For food they had eaten leguana [iguana] and edible cacti, which had somewhat helped to ease their thirst."