Not only is it NOT ''craptastic''it's a masterpiece.
Everybody sees something different, no matter what we're looking at. I thought Eden's Curve was very nearly perfect. For me, it not only fulfilled all its potential, but it broke new ground in doing so. It did many of the things people criticized it for not doing, but it did them in unfamiliar ways, so some viewers thought things hadn't happened when actually they had.
Take character development, for example. There's not a single important character in this movie who's left underdeveloped at all, compared to just about any other movie I can think of. Peter, Joe, Bess, Billy and Ian all are full, three dimensional human beings. Even the frat-house cook feels like somebody I know, and she's only in the movie a total of about two minutes. Of course we don't know every detail of all their histories, we're not told every motive for everything they do, but we don't need all that information to see what kind of people they are. Even in real life, we learn a lot more about people by watching how they act and interact than by listening to them talk.
Peter is an extremely sweet, naive, well-mannered, not exceptionally bright but sexually very curious boy from a respectable middle class Southern family who have sheltered him all his life, so he's weak and has almost no ability to cope with the world outside. He leaves home for the first time in 1972 to attend a small, relatively progressive Southern college, where he is quickly overwhelmed and swept away by the manifold stimulation he finds there. Peter is a classically flawed tragic protagonist; his flaw is that he is completely passive. He always does whatever the stronger-willed people around him pressure him to do, until it's too late.
His frat-house roommate is an intensely seductive, completely unscrupulous, amoral, emotionally unstable and severely spoiled slightly older rich kid from New York (Joe) who had refused to go to college unless his parents bought him his own plane. Across the hall lives a languidly seductive but very intelligent, perceptive, articulate, well-bred and effete (but kind-hearted) Southern aristocratic classicist named Billy, who shoots heroin to "help him cope" but is not by any means a junkie. Peter almost immediately gets caught up in an intense, heady, reckless sexual relationship with Joe and his girlfriend Bess, falling in exactly (we learn later) where Billy had fallen (and escaped) a year or two earlier. The consequences... well, they follow. I won't give away any more, for the sake of people who haven't seen it yet.
Come on! How much character development do we need? How much more than that do we know about any character in any movie? And I could say a lot more about just those three, not to mention Bess and Ian. These are all very rich, full characters! They're believable, almost tangibly real human beings to whom we relate without even noticing we're doing it.
Does anybody who really watches this movie not care what happens to Peter or Ian, or not react with shock at what Joe does and Bess enables, or not like Billy even a little bit? (I like him a lot.) We don't react like that to underdeveloped characters. We react like that to real human beings. We may want to know a lot more about all of them, but that's a sign of a well-developed character—of a person who means something to us—not of an under-developed character.
I had all those reactions and very many more, and I was watching exactly the same movie everybody else was watching, getting the same information everybody got. I didn't make anything up or get any inside information from the filmmakers. It was all there on screen for anybody who was looking to see.
That's just the first of several points I planned to make, including a strong endorsement of what some people call "art house effects," complaining that they detract from the story, as if the director pretentiously and artificially stuck them onto an otherwise good movie. I disagree completely, but I'll save that for another post.