This movie was recommended to me by a friend as a thought provoking movie with lots of dialogue. And in a way, it lived up to that promise.
The Man From Earth certainly provoked plenty of thoughts. The ones I can remember from the top of my head are "My friend must really hate me", "I should turn this off, but what if it gets good later on", "How the hell did this get such a high rating" and "What did I do to deserve this". And there certainly was plenty of dialogue. It wasn't good, or even believable, but it was there. Whole 90 minutes of it.
The idea behind the movie is simple. John is a history professor, who reveals to his collegues that he is 14.000 years old. The entire movie takes place in one evening in John's living room, at what was supposed to be John's going away party but turns into an interrogation. The premise sounds interesting, but a movie like this (eight people talk in one room for 90 minutes) really needs interesting characters and great dialogue to succeed. Sadly, it fails on both accounts.
The characters felt like caricatures, not real people. We have student dating a 50-year-old professor, a religious fanatic who takes the Bible literary, a woman whose first line of dialogue in the movie is "Don't go, I love you", and a psychiatrist on the verge of a mental breakdown. There are one or two more, but they were so poorly developed that I don't remember who they were supposed to be, even though I watched the movie yesterday. But even though the characters were the most unoriginal I've seen lately, the movie would still have something to work with if it was well written. Alas, it was not.
Saying that the dialogue was poor is an understatement. It was unimaginative and lacking of suspense, but the movie has an even greater problem than that. It doesn't have a real plot. The entire movie is just people asking questions, and John answering in a vauge way (along the lines of "I don't really remember anything because it happened such a long time ago"). To be fair there actually is a twist in the movie, but it was poorly executed and when John reveals that he is I couldn't help but laugh.
As the story moved on, that is to say, as the time passed, I was starting to think the reviews this movie got are some sort of a joke. I can forgive bad acting in a low budget movie, but when you combine it with bad editing and a poorly written script the result is simply horrible.
1/5
The Man From Earth (2007)
