Review of The Man from Earth

For a movie that is virtually nothing but talk, the Man From Earth has remarkably little to say of novelty and intelligence. What it does say has been said many times before, much better, and certainly without the hokey premise. The movie begins with a handsome middle aged professor mysteriously announcing that he is leaving his university for points unknown. When pressed, he announces that the reason is because he is 14,000 years old and never ages. Therefore he must uproot himself every 10 years to avoid detection. The rest of the movie involves his friends pressing him for details of his life, which grow more juvenilishly implausible as time goes by. It is one thing to accept the possibility that an individual exists who has lived 14,000 years without aging. It is quite another to accept that he just "happened" to meet, and become friends with, every historical celebrity any of his friends mention in their questioning, from well-known figures in their time as Buddha and Hammurabi, to the completely unknown (in his lifetime) Vincent Van Gogh, who just happened to be his neighbor in 19th century Europe. Right. Nor is it plausible that a person who learned to speak English as an adult would now speak perfect unaccented American English, or that he not only appears, but acts no different than any of his peers. Certainly all of us are aware that people who are older do not only look different, but also act different, with mannerisms, clothing and speech patterns that are noticeably distinguishable from persons just 2 decades younger. How likely is that a 14,000 year old man will look and sound just like a contemporary middle aged man? In short, it is absurd to believe that any intelligent person would have thought that the protagonist's tall tale was anything more than a not particularly clever hoax, which is why I couldn't care less when he finally made his absurd claims regarding his real identity, and offered as revelation the same hackneyed ideas about Judeo-Christianity that are routinely posted by precocious 12 year olds on internet forums.