Earthling

This movie is a disjointed mishmash of things that don't make sense: a meaningless opening, constant, meaningless flashbacks and cuts so big you could sail the Queen Mary through them. Depressing background music. Pointless scenes with no rhyme or reason. Fundamental ideas that we've all seen before - obsessive drawing of pictures from Close Encounters, and symbiotes from Stargate, for example.

The holes in the dialog were so big that at one point I had to rewind to watch the run-up to one scene three times to make sure I hadn't missed something. It turns out I hadn't missed anything - it was either another gaping hole in the dialog or the editor went mad and took a meat axe to it.

If the plot got any vaguer this flick wouldn't have one. It's a low-budget, miserable failure. Save yourself the cost of the video hire. Watching paint dry is more entertaining.

Oh, and don't let the mention of Close Encounters or Stargate mislead you into believing this is actually a sci-fi flick. It isn't. It's more of a weird drama that tries to ask "what makes us human?"

Slow-paced and non-linear, the exposition mirrors the heroine's difficult realization of who she is. With that said, the pace of the movie, while generally slow, often suffers from jumps wherein a significant line is half-muttered and passed by with little further comment. Still, the acting was adequate (often better than adequate) and served to maintain the movie's (at times taxing) air of suspense. The central romance, while touching, was not sufficiently developed. Like the rest of the plot, it builds very slowly, then the movie more or less ends. This film was a nice break from big-budget Hollywood sci-fi, and it is definitely NOT for those who prefer the explosions-and-giant-robots side of the genre. If you enjoyed either version of Solaris, then this, while not as good, should be worth the watch.

Earthling starts out as an intriguing film. We're left to begin piecing together the disjointed bits of storytelling to begin this fantastic sci-fi journey. After about an hour we're still being teased with disjointed information and characters who know what they're doing but unfortunately forgot to tell us the viewer what they're doing. They act with meaning and motivation but there is no clear reason why they are acting and talking the way they are. It's all very well to be mysterious and aloof but frankly i got lost and ending up not caring what they were doing. It's like the director watched too many David Lynch films and tried to outdo him. In the end i got it but i really didn't care. It went from strong, to confusing to will this please end. The only saving grace was the lead actor, she was brilliant but even towards the end you could just see her delivering lines and probably wondering what the hell was going on too. It's nice to evoke feelings and emotions in film but at the end of the day it's about entertainment. It wasn't there.

Some interesting moments early on, but it goes WAY too slow from halfway to the end, plus gets really confused and left me scratching my head. Still not sure what happened and I don't want to watch it again.

While this may not appeal to the general public, it is what science fiction can be. Instead of a bunch of intergalactic cowboys facing off with one another, this is a truly thought provoking movie. There are shades of David Lynch in this stark presentation. Several people are suddenly faced with a kind of mass amnesia after an event they can't entirely explain. Because they are humans, they see what as happening to them initially as a type of disease (even epilepsy in one case). Soon they are draw to each other. Part of their problem is that they are such diverse personalities who are filled with distrust. They are drawn to water, particular just off the shore of a small lake where a series of images invade their psyches. They all have growths on their heads, like the beginnings of little deer antlers. They are also losing some of their skin. Things unfold in a really interesting way with tragic consequences, but there is an answer somewhere and it requires a great deal of trust. While this is a highly imperfect film, I appreciated that their reach exceeds their grasp.