My Unique Movie Watching Experience

The first time I heard about The Man From Earth was a few months ago. The movie is an hour-long discussion of sorts that ensues when a pedagogue presents to his colleagues the hypothesis of a man who has been alive for the past 14000 years. We can imagine how this could go on. My friends who watched it described it using all the superlative adjectives that young men of these times use. “You should make an exception to your anti-piracy principle to this one,” they said. One of those otherwise non-violent friends even threatened to tie me in a chair and forcibly show it to me.

After a few bouts of brown study and shallow search on the Internet, I found no legal avenues to watch the movie on pay-per-view basis but learnt that the producers of the movie thanked torrent sites for marketing the movie. I stumbled upon the official movie website, with a donate button, and contrived to legally watch a pirated copy. So I wrote to the website administrator naïvely asking for pay-per-view sites in India, while hinting that I had access to a pirated copy but would like to pay. Eric D. Wilkinson, one of the movie producers, replied back suggesting that I could go ahead and watch the pirated copy and then donate something or even buy a DVD if I enjoy the movie. Many have done that.

I watched the movie, had my brain cells thoroughly stimulated, felt the way I did about 12 Angry Men, donated for the DVD, and kept the copy.

Nobody wants one around them, but people value old people for the stories of their childhood, to be able to map man’s journey in a more personal manner. Whenever I go to the zoo, I get fascinated by the ripe old tortoises that have lived for a couple of centuries. How much do they remember? Wonder how valuable it would be if tortoises were able to move around freely amidst people and communicate with us. Or at least if we could extract the memories from their minds. Fantastic, so I never dwelled on the thought and left it to SF writers like Jerome Bixby who thoroughly explore such mindboggling fantasies.

The Man From Earth may have been conceived from a fantastic meme about a man who survived 14000 years on earth, but it digs deeper and deals with the core principle of all science fiction: a willful suspension of disbelief. If mankind were to come across a “supernatural” phenomenon that goes against every known scientific fact and every religious belief, would we seek to understand it or deny the occurrence of such a phenomenon?

To explore this simple timeless question Jerome Bixby brought a handful of academicians to a secluded cabin. An anthropologist, an archaeologist, a biologist, a Christian literalist, a historian, a physicist, a psychologist/psychiatrist, a student, and the protagonist. These characters are personifications of their respective fields, but are no stereotypes. They all have their own style or tic or back story or beliefs for reasons better than being a prop to the puppeteers, and above all they are humans defined by their intellectual and emotional limitations. They show how even extremely analytical people when run out of their intellectual fuel go on reserve with their emotional fuel, and how when that burns out people get myopic by the minute.

For a movie with few characters, one location and just one hypothesis to debate on, it is thoroughly enjoyable. It could have been made better but has nothing that puts off a viewer. The novel must be an interesting read.

Spoilers. I initially felt that it would not have mattered how the movie ended. I now think it does. There is a difference between we telling ourselves that it is fiction and the story itself telling us that. The latter would make us feel the way the rest of the academicians felt, would have let us wriggle out of what could be. That is not to say that we are better prepared now. Spoilers end.

Mr. Wilkinson in his mail to me wrote, “All donations go towards everyone who worked on the film. Even after being available for the last 18 months, we are still struggling to break even.” After I donated using a different identity he again wrote, “Believe it or not, we still have a way to go before we get to “breakeven” so, every cent helps. Your donation will go towards everyone that worked on and supported the movie.”

A sad state of independent movies. This is a movie which has been rated at least 9 by over 14,000 people on IMDB and is yet to recover its expenses. It surprises me that one of the biggie studios haven’t bought it. I wonder whether it has been featured on any film festivals, and very much hope that it gets screened in India. A movie like this needs a lot of exposure and for now it can use some tips.

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