Review of The Man from Earth: Holocene (2017) by Abm0 — 13 Jul 2018

This feels much lower-budget than the first one, but it's mostly the acting and to some extent the sound design. There are a few older actors and they do their parts perfectly fine - except William Katt - and then there's the "student" part of the cast, who are pretty much all sub-par (or come out that way due to insufficient cuts to pick from? - not sure how much this has to do with budget). It's a bit a of a shame because the story continuation isn't... necessarily a catastrophe. In some ways it could've been better (like they should've found some intelligent way to make us believe this could happen to someone with thousands of years of experience protecting themselves), but it was a good decision to open-end it and make it so it can redeem itself in a third part.

The big choice to make on the story side is: either keep it focused on religion but then go all the way with the concept of him being someone who's seen everything, heard everything and knows everything that's important to know in the dominant currents of human spirituality (and have him behave as a modern-day prophet somehow?) ORRR switch it up and make him about something other than his religious experience, some other form of deep wisdom or other ability that could be cultivated over thousands of years.

In the end, I'm donating to this team - I think good things can still come out of toying around with this concept some more.