The Man From Earth (2007)

I love a good thought experiment, and "The Man From Earth" is a fantastic one. A group of friends (all professors of some sort, from biology to anthropology to archeology) are sitting in the living room of a small house, eating and drinking and waxing poetic, when one friend, John, poses a unique hypothetical: what if a caveman somehow survived to the present day?

The academic side of everyone begins to theorize how this would work, purely from a science-fiction storytelling aspect. John, however, pushes the premise to the point where his friends as him if he is a caveman, to which he answers in the affirmative. The scientific method kicks in, with each of the others trying to poke holes in his story, but never being able to solidly take him down.

It reminded me of an old internet phenomenon: John Titor. Titor posted on various internet message boards in the early 2000s, claiming to be a time traveler. He gave answers that were just vague enough to be plausible, the sort of thing that an outsider can't disprove beyond doubt. Could some guy have traveled from the future and decided to tell his story online? Sure, why not? Could a caveman survive the past 14,000 years? Sure, why not?

This also reminded me of Ricky Gervais's "The Invention of Lying", in that they both start off as an interesting concept, then grab hold of a very specific religious tangent. "Lying" came out two years after this movie, and "The Man From Earth" never got a large-scale release, so I think this is more a case of parallel thinking as opposed to any kind of theft.

The movie was extremely stripped-down, and read very much like a play. A small cast of characters, one room, no special effects or action sequences, just intense intelligent dialogue. It was filmed on a low budget, so it obviously suffers from some bad film quality and bad lighting and bad editing. Most of the actors are also low-budget, and some of the character reactions are inexplicable antagonistic towards John. Ignoring the production value, and simply focusing on the idea, this is a great movie to share with some friends and see who takes what from it.