(by Aravind R)
Once in a while, there comes a moment when you have no more new movies to watch. BR’s recommendations – all done and dusted. Rotten Tomatoes – nothing above 90% in the genre you’re in the mood to watch. In the race to watch more good movies, you avoid succumbing to the pressure and decide that your happiness is what matters, and not the count of ‘new awesome movies I watched recently’. It was one such moment when I decided to revisit The Man From Earth, a movie that is nothing short of a miracle.
And a miracle it was – it was the first ever movie where the creators thanked the ‘pirates’ or the illegal downloaders for spreading the good word about the movie. Its success, through sheer word of mouth and nothing else, led to a crowd funding of sorts for a sequel. (Sadly, the sequel is not as great, considering the high standards the first movie had set). It was called the best sci-fi / indie movie of all time and won many awards at international film festivals, but then again, failed to make a dime for the creators.
‘The Man from Earth’ is about a professor, John Oldman, who is moving on from his current college to a new place, and the farewell organised by his colleagues and a student, in his house. Yes, the entire movie happens inside a house. The farewell turns out to be something completely unexpected, and then ‘IT’ happens. For obvious reasons, I don’t want to divulge what happens, since that would be a spoiler!
What makes it unique is how a movie can be built on a single idea. No side stories, no other characters in the focus for most part of the film, all intellectual conversations and still managing to make the viewer gasp when the idea hits you. As I write this, I’m also realising how challenging it is to write about this movie without spoiling it, but I’ll give it a shot! Picture this – you are in the driver’s seat and you are climbing up a steep slope without any visibility of what’s beyond the slope. Sure, you can see that the roads are awesome, and you know something is coming, but you have no clue what’s beyond the top point. And then you reach the top and see it all – a breathtaking landscape, with lakes, waterfalls and a beach beyond that. You want to stop the car and take a pause and take it all in, but you want to go further. It is something similar that happened to me. And continues to happen everytime I watch the movie!
The movie was a turning point for me when I first watched it more than a decade back. Prior to this, the amateur movie fan that I was, a great movie meant elaborate sets, visually pleasing cinematography, renowned actors – in short great production values. In that regard, The Man from Earth was an eye opener – it taught me that, in movies and in life, if the idea is great, even with a decent execution, nothing else matters. Apart from opening up a classics-only reader to science fiction, it started being a source of inspiration, motivating me to discover and relish in new ideas at work and elsewhere. I would later realise that the movie was also the seed that started questioning my religious beliefs.
More than anything, it taught me to suspend my disbelief. Be it another movie that you are enjoying immensely, but abound with glaring loopholes, or a book which demands you to take off to an imaginary land leaving the rational and the known behind, or in life when you meet that special someone, who is poles apart from you, but you still end up falling in love with! Suffice to say that ‘The Man from Earth’ – which has no A-listers, which wasn’t a great box office success, which has no violence, action or even trailer-worthy content, continues its reign as one of my all time favourite movies.
Baradwaj Rangan 
Yajiv
February 6, 2021
Thank you for reminding me of this gem of a movie. I remember watching it back in my college days. Such a slow burn with deep themes.
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Rajesh
February 6, 2021
This is one of my favorite movie. I discovered it a decade back and have revisited it quite a few times since then.
I would also like to draw attention to a section near the end where a very tense conversation happens with a big reveal at the end. We are completely enthralled in that. And then someone asks to stop the music. It’s only then you realise how much that music affects the whole mood of your movie and your emotion. One of the best use of music I experienced.
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Naren
February 7, 2021
Actually the original movie made $20,000 [approx. 20% of the budget] only due to the popularity of the torrent users. They setup an online donation and it paid off what it cud. Then companies picked up on this and started distributing and eventually they broke even. Even the second one, despite being an abyssmal disappointment did make $45,000 just due to torrent popularity carried over from the first one. BTW, both parts were self-pirated. The makers released them online themselves and that’s what really caught the attention of so many people.
It was one hell of a dark horse when it came out. At that time I knew only John Billingsley, Tony Todd and Richard Riehle in the cast but nevertheless, none of them disappointed. What it really deserved was “The Blair Witch Project” treatment but that’s where piracy also casts the negative shadow. It’s really a double-edged sword. The Blair Witch Project came out just before Napster and other P2P applications and their $60,000 budget paid off a whopping $250 Million. One of the very few highest grossers in hollywood history.
One other movie that comes to mind was another darkhorse that came out a little before this one . . . Kiss Kiss Bang Bang [2005]. The movie did break even from worldwide box office but it’s popularity soared much higher, in part due to piracy, another part being Robert Downey Jr. and another being the quirky and humurous nature of the movie.
Considering all the hyperbolical promotions and exorbitant budgets of movies like “The Long Kiss Goodnight” [Geena Davis, Samuel Jackson], “Cutthroat Island” [Geena Davis, Matthew Modine, Frank Langella], Waterworld etc. and their dismal performances at the box office, small and micro budget movies like these do really deserve and lot more promotion and popularity.
From the second decade there are two directors, Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead who r making small and micro budget movies that r seeing some popularity though they deserve more. Their most recent one “Synchronic” despite not being their best work has gained some popularity due to the leads, Anthony Mackie and Jamie Dornan. One guy who really deserves a hell of a lot more attention and popularity is Shane Carruth.
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krishikari
February 8, 2021
The Netflix blurb has a spoiler! Don’t look.
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