Jerome Bixby's The Man from Earth

TL;DR - WOW!Ok, so - here's the thing - I do NOT like spoilers!I lose all interest in a movie if someone gives away crucial details.A friend told me about this movie, and I wasn't expecting to want to see it, so I asked about the ending.Then I mentioned the movie to someone else I thought might be interested, and they *did* want to see it, so we watched it together, and I was riveted the entire time - even knowing way more than I wanted to for a movie I did wind up watching, the way the story unfolds kept me *very* interested.I think this is one of the best most underrated sci-fi flicks I've ever seen.

Yes friends, this IS quite a spectacle. No doubt triggered for release to coincide with the big Zeitgeist/Project Venus* push from our benevolent freemason overlords.* Note: While I agree nearly verbatim with the last two sections of the original Zeitgeist film, it is the first section that I take great issue with as a hound of truth and REAL history. There are several cash rewards offered to anyone who can prove the claims Zeitgeist makes concerning Biblical Christianity (much like there is for anyone who can prove the Theory of Evolution). And yes, you WILL have to provide sources that pre-date 19th century Theosophical writings, lol.The pretext to this film is a gathering of highly intelligent professors from an unnamed university that are a bit perplexed to see the sudden, unexplained departure of one of their colleagues for points unknown. Over the course of a bit of good-natured cajoling and a sip of whiskey, good John divulges his sordid past, much to the alternating chagrin, intrigue, anger and disbelief of his fellows.I must say, what follows IS the pinnacle of Darwinian fantasy. It is clear that Richard Dawkins would be outclassed by the likes of Jerome Bixby, as this film makes the best arguments philosophically, anthropologically and otherwise, that it possibly can within the narrow confines of its paradigm.That said, in order for one to be anything but mildly humored by its "dignity restoring" plot, one must first accept its premise that modern, mainstream "scientific" theories on anthropology are a foregone conclusion, beyond all debate. In other words (as any good evolutionist will earnestly tell you), they are established FAAAACT!But, for the sake of artistic license, and strict belief in the freedom of speech and expression, I gladly grant Bixby his whimsical premise and critique the film from there.Where Bixby goes astray is in creating a blatant attack on Biblical Christianity that is disguised as a clever, conceptual, sci-fi piece. The only ones apparently NOT fooled by this are Biblical, fundamentalist Christians (fundies, as I've heard it put, lol), such as myself, and the author himself, who quite obviously crafted the screenplay while raging (much like Dawkins) against the "God of injustice" he had created for himself, as he wrote revisionist line after unsubstantiated line attempting to undermine the Truth he was not willing to look full in the face.Like all good agnostics (i.e. atheists who have lost their faith) Bixby clings to Buddha, the philosopher of Nothingness, a religion that can safely coincide with his "science."** The Theory of Evolution, which is the science of Nothingness. Allow me to delineate. On the origins of our universe (from the evolutionary point of view):"We now know our universe is finite, NOT inifinte as once was thought. Given that it is ever-expanding, it must, by nature, have started from one central point. (No one should EVER confuse this central point with a Creator God, just as no one should EVER confuse Mitochondrial Eve or Y-Nuclear Adam with the Adam and Eve of Genesis!) This central point was once thought to be huge, then about the size of a golf ball, then about the size of a period at the end of a sentence, now we KNOW that it was, in essence, nothing.Something exploded from this Nothing and Everything now in existence came from that Something.You weren't there, so you can't tell us it didn't!This acceptance of the Everything that came from the Something that exploded from Nothing is NOT belief, how dare you equate it to the same sort of blind faith that allows morons to cling to Bronze Age myths?! Believing in Nothing is much more intellectually honest than believing in some sort of "Sky Daddy!" Your God is no better than a Spaghetti Monster or a dragon in the garage or the Easter Bunny or Santa Claus that I could dream up to control the darkened minds of simpletons. The Nothing is PROVEN FACT because God is NOT. Got it?Our universe is, as we have said, finite, but there is NO WAY anything, such as an infinite, all-powerful, all-knowing, omniprescent Creator God of perfect love and perfect justice can exist outside, within and all around it, as we refuse to believe in anything. We only accept facts. And the fact is, we just don't know.We DO accept the existence of tiny, invisible particles called neutrinos, however, that pass in, around, over and through everything--- no matter how solid--- by the billions and trillions and gadzillions per second. These incredible phenomena should never be confused with any notions about the omniprescence of God because we have made SCIENTIFIC calculations of them, and as we KNOW, God has NOTHING to do with REAL Science." * * *Naturally, like all good Hollywood fare, the only opposition to the claims made by the film's protagonist is a bitter, dried-up old crone who is obviously sheltered and clings to her faith for lack of a real life. We who have actually never been granted the ivory tower escapist "reality" that makes such fantasy plausible, can only smile knowingly and give the propagators of such convenient myth kudos for fulfilling the prophecies of Romans 1, 2Peter 3 and 2Thessalonians 2, among others, assuring us of the soon return of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.The media always shows the fringe lunatics which call themselves Christians, NEVER the millions who live seeking to emulate Christ. Howard Camping, the militias, the Koran burner, pederast priests, the Westboro Baptists-- the media absolutely loves these people and the gullible gobble it up as it appeals to their preconceptions.Imagine seeing an old man (say, Noam Chomsky, for instance) paraded out with a billboard for McDonalds on his back, stickers for IBM, Starbucks and Chase Manhattan all across his lapels and a tatoo on his forehead proclaiming, "Buy at Walmart!" And then envision your media telling you that this was emblematic of what an anarchist (or libertarian socialist) was! Would you feel like you were getting a straight scoop? No? Yet, most in the modern world buy into the EXACT same kind of bilge when it is fed them about Biblical, fundamentalist Christians. Quite telling. Only in a culture that "educates" itself so thoroughly, as ours does, are such laughably preposterous notions propagated and embraced.How this movie could be anything but an openly hostile attack against Christianity is beyond any serious analysis. The very premise is based on the modern myths of anthropology that were dreamed up to undermine Genesis. The film even admits that there were no real differences between "Cro-magnons" and modern man. It is all just inference to fit preconception, like the rest of Darwinian theory.Then to equate Christ to a cave dweller who somehow manages to live forever, to totally undermine the account of the crucifixion and to hold Buddha as the master Christ studied under...the type of sordid rubbish only the truly naive could swallow.Of course, that is the purpose of "higher education," to allow the naive to think they actually know something about something. The blind leading the blind-- they both end up in the ditch, as Christ said. Look around you at the world the Darwinians have shaped over the past hundred years for proof of how "enlightened" they are. "The fear of the Lord is the BEGINNING of wisdom." The Bible proclaims, and if your front page news is not indicative of this truth, than you are suffering from willful ignorance and delusion, the like of which only Christ can release you from.Anyone who would like to view the matter from the other side, from men who have spent their lives in actual research (outside of 19th century Theosophical revisionist sources like Madame Blavatsky and Albert Pike), check out the short book, "The Lotus and the Cross: Jesus Talks With Buddha" by Ravi Zacharias and also the 3 disc film set by Lee Strobel, The Case for Christ, The Case for Faith, and The Case for a Creator.It's fine to sit back like Richie Dawkins and commend yourself that you have some sort of intellectual superiority over the "duped followers of Bronze Age myth," but if you do not challenge your preconceptions with the best counter-arguments, what kind of scholar are you?There are three fundamentals in this existence which the pinnacle of modern science and philosophy can in no way account for. Life, that which makes this existence possible; Light and Love, that which gives this existence purpose and meaning. If you can come up with ANY idea outside of Biblical Christianity that can account for these three fundamentals to our existence, feel free to let me know.Peace unto you all, and may God continue to guide you on your search for Truth.

Honestly I watched this movie as I played solitaire, it is a good one to have on in the background because it is just a great conversation to listen in on, more than once I found myself wanting to ask questions too. As a minor history buff I found more than one discrepancy to the Historical, they could have done more research into all. Granted at the time Gobekli Tepi was still only recently discovered and not yet given it's date, pre dating anything we knew before it, a monolithic site predating even Stonehenge by thousands of years.Honestly I'd love an updated version where maybe it is still set in that early 2000's and he talks about how people even though they were hunter gatherers they still had community gathering places, not just sites of religious importance but cities even, capable of holding thousands of people at once.We just have so much more evidence in the last 20 years than we had 50 years prior.I quite enjoyed this film, despite being a devote Christian I can still see the mirrored connection of all the ancient stories. Would recommend to historical syfy nerds.

This film would make a decent stage play, but it's a little constrained for a movie. "Movie", after all, is short for "moving picture"; and moving is one thing this film doesn't do. The same characters are in the same confined location from start to finish, with only one character making a major entrance and exit and reentrance. (And that character's entrance, while believable when it happened, became less believable in hindsight: if his wife died the day before, would he really drive out to a remote mountain cabin to engage in a philosophical debate?) If you could go back in time, set up a camera, and film one of your old college bull sessions, you would capture the action of this film.That being said, it's not bad as college bull sessions go. The characters are smart and cranky, exactly what you want for a rousing debate. And unlike some bull sessions that wander aimlessly, this one has a unifying theme: the central character, John, claims to be 14,000 years old; and the others -- erudite professors all -- strive to debunk his claim. (The professors are recognizable academic cliches: the bemused skeptic who takes nothing seriously; the aging hippie who picks up undergrad women as a way to cling to his youth; the psychologist who's sure he understands everyone better than they understand themselves; the token Christian; and the voice of reason.)This is hardly a unique idea for a story. I first encountered it in an old Star Trek episode, Requiem for Methuselah, written by the same Jerome Bixby who wrote this film; and it wasn't an original idea way back then, either. But what I find most interesting in this story compared to so many stories of immortals is how ordinary the immortal is, and how limited his scope of history is. In so many immortal stories, the immortal has played key roles throughout history (in the Star Trek episode, the immortal was secretly Alexander the Great, Lazarus, Leonardo DaVinci, Johannes Brahms, King Solomon, Merlin, Methuselah, and Reginald Pollack); and the immortal has a grand, sweeping memory of history, a synthesis of everything we know of history today. In this film, John is just a guy who lived through times and places, and only knows the tiny slice of the world he saw. As he says at one point, "One man, in one place." And just as you or I might forget names and faces of people we knew 20 years ago, or might forget the foreign language we studied back in college, John remembers only bits and pieces of everything he has experienced. That makes his story more human and believable, while simultaneously making it impossible for his friends to disprove that story. Almost any attempt to trip him up on facts can be answered simply: "I wasn't there" or "I don't remember" or "That's not what I saw."And the one exception is perhaps the weakest point of the film: John claims to be the merely human inspiration for the story of Jesus; and this claim deeply offends the token Christian in the group. Leaving theology aside, that undermined the uniqueness of the "One man, in one place" approach to immortality. And it didn't add much to the story, either: again, you'll hear similarly deep discussions of religious history in any college dorm, without requiring any immortal to complicate the discussion. All this revelation really adds to the story is a mild degree of conflict and emotional involvement otherwise pretty much lacking, and an excuse to wrap up the bull session (and the film) before feelings get hurt. (This is NOT the most shocking revelation of the film. That comes at the very end, and is marginally more original.)Looking back on my review, it looks pretty harsh for a film I rated 4 stars. Somehow despite the flaws I see in this film, I mostly enjoyed it. I like idea-driven science fiction, which is pretty rare; and maybe I still have some nostalgia for those college bull sessions.

El escalado es decente, al fin y al cabo es una película vieja independiente. Lo imperdonable y y ojalá pudiera pedir un reembolso, es que los subtítulos ESTÁN DESFASADOS. ¿Cómo es posible que en una película original, cuyos diálogos lo son todo, aparezcan los títulos desfasados al punto de ser confusa de ver? No pude tener mayor decepción. Los extras lo valen pero es un dolor, de verdad, tratar de seguirle el paso a la película con subtítulos mal sincronizados.

日本未公開、未発売でありながら、高評価の作品でかつSFであるのに興味を持って購入しましたが、この作品は小空間の演劇的な作品で映画としてはどうなのかな？また、やはりそういう作品なので英語の理解力が必須なので私にはハードルが高すぎた。それなりには面白かったけど。クラウドファンディングで有名になっている作品のようです。

One of the last works of the autor, if not the last. This guy write sience fiction back in the sixties. The action tales place in a living room mostly all the time, but takes your thaughts far away. Trust me, see it with open mind. You have Tony Todd in the lead roles.

Llego antes de lo esperado, excelente contenido

La película es genial.El problema es que los subtítulos en cualquier idioma están varios segundos desfasados.A alguien le pasa lo mismo o será defecto del producto ?