Earthling (2011)

Strictly average movie

it is the rare 'crazy' movie that actually has something to say.

It is both painfully honest and laugh-out-loud funny at the same time.

The tone of this movie is interesting -- the stakes are both dramatic and high, but it's balanced with a lot of fun, tongue and cheek dialogue.

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.

A frustrating film, mostly in the final third, for the simple reason that the "explanations" given to the viewers do very little to convey either what the aliens are about, what they plan(ned), or what they really want(ed). The flashbacks are particularly bad i.e. useless.The first half of the movie is appropriately mysterious, so far so good, but as soon as the script brings about attempts to clarify the back story, bit by bit, "Earthling" starts falling apart, because some major confusion starts setting in. I would estimate that only approximately 30% of what is "explained" (ha ha) is comprehensible. The rest is verbal junk, clumsily written.The writer/director was clearly too incompetent in explaining the story to the viewer through the awful flashbacks and messy dialogue, i.e. both in the verbal and visual department, hence he should then have not tried at all and kept the aliens' background mysterious. Either that, or he should have simply asked someone more adept in writing screenplays to help him with the movie, because he clearly doesn't have a grasp of the barest essentials in letting a mystery unfold. "Scriptwriting For Dummies", that's the book I'll get him for Christmas.Otherwise, it's not a bad film. Not terribly original, what with its over half-a-century old "body snatchers from space" basic premise, but fairly entertaining thanks to a few small touches of originality here and there and a female cast that tries.Speaking of which, the actors mumbling through some of the dialogue didn't help matters either. So when I said that they "try", I meant that they tried to open their mouths to form the words that make up their lines, because I suspect that the director either drugged them or glued their lips together. Or perhaps they were a little embarrassed about the confusing nonsense that was coming out of their mouths, they didn't want to be understood.Combine the muddled dialogue, the confusing flashbacks, and the actors' mumbling, and you've really got quite a film soup. Not so much food for thought as virtual food for thought. A carrot that just keeps moving away, rather than coming closer to us. Basically an almost impossible to follow story. Even though the story's essential elements are obvious, it's the many details that get lost in the maze of the director's horrible writing.

This is a very ambitious and complex sci-fi drama with a low budget. It has some similarities to "Another Earth", but this plot is much more complicated. Imagine a mix of dreamy Sopphia Coppola-scenes and some David Cronenberg-creatures, then add some "Solaris". The slow pace and feeling of the film is very beautiful and hypnotic, like Another Earth. The acting in Earthling is really good, especially the main character, and the plot is very implicit witch kept me interested throughout the whole movie. For instance, no one ever mentions the word "alien" or "planet", you have to keep guessing. This is the typical "Filmfestival-sci-fi-drama".

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.