I saw some video clips online (I can’t remember the platform) and grabbed the title that they annoyingly never put in their posts.

So I finally watched, “Man from Earth”, and it was an astonishingly good movie given the simplicity of the set. The cast was great, the directing was great, and the story was outstanding.

The Story (no spoilers)

If you haven’t seen it, you should. The premise is simple: A man from 14,000 years ago has been wandering from place to place every 10 years or so when people notice he’s not aging.

He’s been trying to make sense of his own memories with modern knowledge, learning as he grows and everyone else just ages.

It was really, really good – one of those movies that leaves you imagining, wondering and thinking.

This was a story completed on the deathbed of Jerome Bixby, it ends up. There’s a Wikipedia entry on The Man From Earth that is worth a read, though there are some spoilers. Piracy apparently gave it a boost when it was released as well.

I will be watching The Man From Earth: Holocene soon because of it.

Thoughts on the Story (spoilers)

Probably the part that grabbed me most was how he had to ‘put it all together’ as we went forward in time and he had to make sense of thousands of years of life across spaces that have different names now.

For me, that felt pretty close to home: I traveled, saw people in different stages of their lives in different stages of everything, unlike people who stay in the same place, rooted more and more deeply. Sure, some folks have the Internet ‘equivalent’ to that, but it’s not the same as the real experience of it, the smells, the feel, how you feel in the environment.. that’s so human that people don’t get to appreciate anymore.

It’s also a poetic way of describing our own species. We’re constantly trying to make sense of our past, analyzing it, scraping it down to the bone. That the characters are all professors really sets that up too because these are supposed to be the people who are the experts on the very things we measure ourselves by because we teach them from generation to generation, getting a little further every generation.

And, we still don’t know what this is all about.

That’s why I look at this movie as art.