“You’re a real smooth talker, Professor Young. While you’re certainly not Jesus, you do remind me of someone else from the Bible. Someone with miraculous powers of persuasion. Someone obsessed with transforming the world, overturning the true message of the Bible. You’re not Jesus Christ. You’re the Antichrist.”
The original Man from Earth, while not as mind-blowing as some seem to think it is, was at least interesting, and a good lesson in low budget filmmaking. Becoming a viral hit through file sharing sites, its director Richard Schenkman was hoping to make a sequel for quite some time. A decade later that sequel finally arrived, but The Man from Earth: Holocene is much less intriguing than the first one. It works best when it follows the talk-heavy formula of the first film, but investigates some of the least interesting aspects of the titular character.
John Oldman (David Lee Smith), now going by John Young, has lived for 14,000 years. Familiarity with the first film—where his origins and life are discussed—is not necessary but will help frame the topics that are covered here. We pick up the story with John about to depart on his regular sever-all-ties-every-ten-years jaunt to a different part of the world. But something is different; instead of recovering his youthful energy like he is used to, John is starting to age. Additionally, four of his students begin to gradually piece together the startling truth about their professor.
The students get their hands on the book that Art Jenkins (William Katt) wrote after the conversation in the first film. They try different methods for cornering John—getting pictures, seducing him—but eventually just confront him and then kidnap him. While being held at knifepoint, John answers questions from Philip (Sterling Knight), a devout Christian who is struggling with the theological implications of John’s life. This is about the only worthwhile portion of the film, but it is still middling at best.
While I had issues with the first film, I at least appreciated that it committed to its course of action—it was all talk, without any meaningless side stories to detract from what they believed was a profound exploration of the idea. In Holocene, way too much of the runtime is devoted to inconsequential melodramatics. Technically, it is passable, but it barely assembles into a watchable film. The music is trite and used liberally throughout the film in the oddest of places.
Smith has obviously aged since the first film, and the filmmakers clumsily add a mid-credits gag to potentially set up future installments. In an era when a conceptually interesting series is much needed to combat the effects-laden vehicles that pass as “sci-fi” today, it’s a shame that something with a neat idea ended up so bad.