6 | / 10 |
Users | 0.0 | |
Reviewer | 3.0 | |
Overall | 3.0 |
14,000 year-old "Man from Earth" John Oldman, now teaching in northern California, realizes that not only is he finally starting to age, but four students have discovered his deepest secret, putting his life in grave danger and potentially destroying the world's most popular religion.
Starring: William Katt, Michael Dorn, Vanessa Williams (V), Sterling Knight, Brittany CurranSci-Fi | 100% |
Drama | Insignificant |
Fantasy | Insignificant |
Video codec: MPEG-4 AVC
Video resolution: 1080p
Aspect ratio: 1.78:1
Original aspect ratio: 1.85:1
English: DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1
English: LPCM 2.0
English SDH, French, Spanish, Dutch, Icelandic, Swedish
Blu-ray Disc
Single disc (1 BD)
Region A, B (C untested)
Movie | 3.0 | |
Video | 4.0 | |
Audio | 4.0 | |
Extras | 3.0 | |
Overall | 3.0 |
Mention “science fiction” and “film” together, and chances are visions of phantasmagorical special effects and mind blowing production design will come to mind. Those aspects were most definitely missing from The Man from Earth when it came out in 2007, a pet project of sorts by legendary writer Jerome Bixby (The Twilight Zone, Star Trek: The Original Series). Bixby spent years crafting a screenplay about a man blessed or cursed (depending how you want to look at it) with seeming immortality, a guy who has been around since the Cro-Magnon era, but who has most recently been masquerading as a college professor named John Oldman (David Lee Smith). Oldman’s strategy for untold millennia has been to adopt a new identity every ten years or so as people start to realize he’s not aging, and the original The Man from Earth was a very talky affair built around a “goodbye party” Oldman experiences with a bunch of his college professor cohorts. What begins as a hypothetical “what if a man were able to live forever” discussion becomes decidedly more personal as that film progresses, with a number of fascinating and even provocative discussions taking place (Oldman, it turns out, has been any number of fairly famous people, including some religious icons, in his long life). Almost all of The Man from Earth took place in one kind of dowdy living room, with the various participants simply talking back and forth, certainly not most people’s idea of what a “science fiction film” should be like. And yet The Man from Earth developed a rather considerable cult following through the years, one that ultimately led to this sequel, written by Bixby’s son, Emerson, along with director Richard Schenkman. Once again, there’s a rather thoughtful approach toward the subject matter, with a few pointed digs at everything from Christianity to Scientology that may rub a few people the wrong way, and once again, this is a very talky feature, though it attempts to open up the first film at least a little bit by having both John, now having taken the cheeky surname Young, and a bunch of students who think they’ve discovered his secret, get out and about on various adventures. While the film has its heart in the right place, the writing is often fairly labored, and some of the performances by the kids playing the students don’t quite match the professionalism of some of the older (if not quite that old, so to speak) players.
Man from Earth: Holocene is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of MVD Visual with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.78:1. This digitally shot feature boasts decent detail levels most of the time, but it's kind of curiously soft looking on occasion, especially in some of the outdoor material. Brief flashbacks to the first film (which was shot on MiniDV as outlined in my review of that outing) show a fair amount of raggedness. The palette is nicely suffused throughout much of the film, though the long sequence between John and Philip is bathed in kind of gray and purplish shadows which tend to mask fine detail levels. There are some noticeable if brief moments of banding, typically in some of the "nature" scenes that feature elements like bright sunlight breaking over the horizon.
Probably because Man from Earth: Holocene is so relentlessly talky, there's not a huge difference between the DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 and LPCM 2.0 tracks offered on this disc. Mark Hinton Stewart's kind of New Age-y, piano based score gets a wider soundstage on the surround track, as should be expected, but it sounds fine in both iterations. Otherwise, aside from some fleeting ambient environmental sounds when John goes on a camping getaway, the film tends to be anchored pretty resolutely front and center in both mixes. Fidelity is fine throughout, and there are no problems with damage, distortion or dropouts.
In a kind of funny production error (to those other than MVD folks, anyway), this title was delayed because the first pressing actually contained the first film again instead of this sequel. Not to be too dismissive, but that may have been the smarter strategy in the long run. Man from Earth: Holocene has some really interesting content, especially with regard to the showdown between John and Philip, but it's marred by too many detours (what is up, for example, with the brief cameo by Michael Dorn as John's supervisor at the college or the almost Lolita-esque Tara subplot?) and is perhaps even more hobbled by some less than convincing performances and an ending that seems considerably ill advised. That said, fans of the first film may well want to check this out, and for them technical merits are generally fine and the supplementary package quite inviting.
(Still not reliable for this title)
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