Rating summary

Movie		3.0
Video		4.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		3.0
Overall		3.0

The Man from Earth: Holocene Blu-ray Movie Review

Time's up.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman April 15, 2018

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.

John (once again played by David Lee Smith) has matriculated to yet another college, where, as John Young, he teaches a comparative religion class while shacking up with his colleague Carolyn Kittriss (Vanessa Williams). The film begins with an uncharacteristically salacious ambience, with an introductory scene in a natural history museum dedicated to Mankind’s ancient past, where Professor Kittriss is attempting to educate a bunch of unruly students. A kid named Liko (Carlos Knight) whispers to a buddy of his about how he’d like to “tap” a Cro-Magnon woman shown in a diorama, and a few minutes later another student named Tara (Brittany Curran) confides to one of her friends how she would like to (more or less) “tap” Professor Young himself. It’s a potentially off putting beginning to a film which otherwise tends to discuss various religious and philosophical concepts with at least passing degrees of insight.

John is feeling like his basic genetic immutability is in fact changing somehow, as evidenced by a few stray gray hairs and things like bags under his eyes. Carolyn pooh-poohs everything, telling him to enjoy the wisdom that comes with old age (yeah, right). Meanwhile, though, another student named Isabel (Akemi Look) borrows some books from John, which turn out to include a now notorious tome by the character of Art Jenkins (William Katt) from the first film. Jenkins, once a respected archeologist, wrote a supposed non-fiction work documenting his interchanges with the man he knew as John Oldman, a work which instantly invited brickbats from the scholarly community and which effectively ended Jenkins’ career. Unfortunately for John, the book of Jenkins that John loans to Isabel includes an inscription “to my good friend John Oldman”, which leads Isabel and her friends to begin investigating just who Oldman was and who Young may be. That sets up the central supposed “mystery” of the film, though of course the “solution” is already a given.

The screenplay is almost agonizingly ill conceived at times, having Isabel manage to track down people who remember John in various guises, while repeatedly delaying an expected showdown between John and Art (to the point that once Art finally agrees to travel to the kids to certify John’s identity, his car breaks down, resulting in another stalling tactic). However, that at least allows the film to indulge in what is inarguably its strongest sequence, a long “two hander” (as in certain moments in the first film) between John and a devout Christian student named Philip (Sterling Knight). It’s here that the film really approaches the cerebral intensity of the first film, as Philip, who might cheekily be referred to as a nascent Doubting Thomas, has to question all sorts of his beliefs about Jesus, if, that is, he ends up believing that John was Jesus. It’s a really well done, if arguably too long, scene, one which ends with Philip deciding to test the waters (so to speak) vis a vis John’s immortality with a nearby knife.

Unfortunately it’s here that the film tips over into sheer ridiculousness. Most armchair scenarists are probably going to guess what happens to John, who’s left alone tethered to a chair in a basement after he’s been seriously wounded, while Philip flees, panic stricken. But what really sinks this film is the arrival of Art and the kids, who survey a scene littered with blood and broken furniture and then spend a patently ludicrous amount of time debating whether or not to call the police. That then segues to a brief coda documenting an expected outcome, which in turn segues to another mid-credits coda which is truly mindboggling. As those who read my original The Man from Earth Blu-ray review may recall, one of the things that delayed the production of the original film after Jerome Bixby’s death was the fact that many potential producers wanted to tweak Bixby’s formulation to have shadowy CIA types chasing after John, something that Emerson decried and firmly stated he wouldn’t allow to happen. But, guess what? — that’s right, this film closes with a brief vignette with a supposed FBI agent (whose face is never shown, though I have a strong hunch who it is) interrogating Art about an immortal serial killer, in what the commentary suggests is a set up either for another film or a long form television series. If this is the way John’s world ends, it’s definitely not with a bang, but with a whimper.

The Man from Earth: Holocene Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

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.

The Man from Earth: Holocene Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

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.

The Man from Earth: Holocene Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Behind the Scenes Featurette (1080p; 39:17) is a very nicely done overview of the project, touching on some of the plot elements of the first film and also offering fun candid shots and good interviews.


• Original Score Featurette (1080p; 18:05) features composer Mark Hinton Stewart, who scored both films.


• Dances With Films Festival Premiere Q & A (1080i; 16:05) features an assortment of cast and crew.


• Dances With Films Festival Premiere Red Carpet Interview (1080i; 11:15) features Richard Schenkman.


• Deleted Scenes (1080p; 3:04) are available with optional commentary by Schenkman and producer Eric D. Wilkinson.


• Man from Earth Remastered DVD/Blu Promo (1080p; 1:29)


• Man from Earth Holocene Teaser (1080p; 1:24)


• Man from Earth Holocene Trailer (1080p; 1:30)


• MMA Training Video (1080p; 00:47) pops up on a television screen briefly in the film.


• Photo Gallery (1080i; 1:51)


• Poster Gallery (1080i). This supplement has not been authored to show a timecode, but it does progress automatically if you wait long enough.


• Pop Books Cover Gallery (1080i) features mock ups of the supposed books by Oldman and Jenkins. This supplement has not been authored to show a timecode, but it does progress automatically if you wait long enough.


• Audio Commentary features writer-director Richard Schenkman and producer Eric D. Wilkinson (who sounds like he's literally phoning it in).

The Man from Earth: Holocene Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

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.