The Man from Earth

I ran across this little gem almost entirely by accident.  The Man from Earth is a brilliant film that you’re unlikely to have watched unless it’s been recommended to you by somebody else. With minimal production budget, and virtually no funds at all for marketing, the film has had to rely solely on word of mouth for its success.

Written by the bearer of geek wet-dreams, Jerome Bixby, it focuses on a departing college professor whose friends throw him a surprise farewell party at his cabin in the woods. When they probe him for his reasons for leaving, he claims that he is a 14,000 year-old Cro-Magnon who somehow has not aged over the past millenia. Every ten years or so, when people realise that he’s not getting visibly older, he packs up and starts a new life.

This isn’t taken kindly by his friends and colleagues. Not only do they find the idea preposterous and outlandish, but even when they overcome the first hurdle of cynicism they are then faced with someone who claims to have had first-hand knowledge of much of humanity’s history. Unsurprisingly, his views at times differ significantly to written history which raises the tension levels in the room to boiling point.

And herein lies the film’s greatest strength, which is a pretty unsettling one: the film puts forward a damn good argument. It’s bizarrely feasible.

Virtually the whole film is set in his living room, and it is shot and rolls out like a play, with the plot moving forward through the intellectual and emotional arguments between the various characters.

There are some actors here that you’ll vaguely recognise (I’ll never forget the face of the portly fellow who sucked off Joseph Gordon-Levitt in Mysterious Skin) but the chances are that you won’t know the names of any of the cast.

Obviously a difficult film to market, it’s found its success through BitTorrent, with the producer thanking users for the film’s spread (hear that Hollywood!?). On the surface it might seem like a boring premise with no selling point, but it’s probably one of the most rewarding films to find its way onto my screen in the past year.

Ok, so what’s the bad stuff? The production quality is just not there. The images are grainy, the sounds are disjointed and the whole film feels like it was shot on a student’s budget (which it probably was). However, these are minor flaws in a great movie.

Having won a slew of awards, the film’s success shows what media is capable of and hopefully it’ll act as a catalyst for similar releases. With real quality finding success without the backing of the major studios, it’s perhaps inevitable that more and more gems will sneak through.

I just pray that it’s a trend that catches on. Fuck knows, it sure beats another Transformers movie, no matter how much Megan Fox bends over.