Review: Eden

Eden by Christopher Sebela
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

This graphic novel states it was "based on an original screenplay." An unproduced one, evidently? If so, I can see why it was unproduced, as the science is not great. (Although that's also true of most produced SFF screenplays.) At any rate, I think this works better as a comic, and is surely cheaper than the 9 figures it would have cost to film it.

This story takes place in the near future, when climate change has caused massive human displacement and there are refugee camps all over the world, as people are forced out of places that aren't habitable anymore. (So far, that isn't "science fiction" at all....) In the meantime, there is a supposedly habitable exoplanet discovered in another system, and ships departing on a regular basis to this "new Eden," taking millions of people who have won a lottery for the 15-month journey. (And that right there broke my suspension of disbelief, as a 15-month interstellar journey anywhere means ratcheting up to a significant percentage of lightspeed, which isn't possible now and likely won't be possible for decades to come, if ever. Anyway...) The comic opens with the story of the Tremaine family, who have won the lottery and are telling how they feel about making the trip.

Only, as we soon discover, they aren't the "Tremaine family" at all, but rather three imposters who broke into the Tremaine's apartment the night before they were due to leave, tied them up and stashed them in the closet, and took their place. Which....that was a bit of over-the-top implausibility that was necessary to the plot, and all the more grating because of it. The ship even beeps as they are being loaded into their cryogenic sleeping chambers, warning that the DNA doesn't match, and the Edencorp representative in charge says they're behind schedule and pushes the imposter family through anyway. (Which sounds like a corporate mentality for sure.) The fake family is on board when the ship launches, only to be abruptly woken up even before they have made it out of the solar system....because the ship loops around the far side of the moon and proceeds to dump millions of people out of their storage pods to die on the moon's surface where they cannot be seen.

(At that point I rolled my eyes and thought, "Really?" Even today there are satellites in orbit that monitor the far side of the moon. And no one ever thought to ask why the colony ships returned rather sooner than they were supposed to?)

(Actually, the more I'm breaking this down, the more I'm realizing I really didn't like it. I can also see why the film was never made.)

So now our fake Tremaine family has to fight their way to the ship's cockpit, take control, and attempt to save the rest of the passengers. There is, of course, a corporate conspiracy to mitigate climate change by reducing Earth's population tens of millions of people at a time (at least until the far side of the moon is full up, I suppose) that gets exposed. Our plucky fake family--complete with unnaturally precocious pre-teen daughter who solves every problem the adults can't manage--takes over the ship and ends up taking it on an interstellar journey for real, searching for a planet that might be an actual "new Eden." (Although I wonder why they would trust Edencorp to build technology that would actually keep people alive on such a journey, as they never intended it to leave the solar system at all.)

This was meant to be triumphant and uplifting, I'm sure, and our imposters are a rather appealing, if ruthless, family. The art does help to cover the plot holes, but only to a point. But if this screenplay had actually been made, it would have been a C-movie at best. Adjust your expectations accordingly.

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