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Absolutely brilliant

While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

A clunky actioner with a handful of cool moments.

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

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.

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.

Do you ever feel like you just don't fit in? Maybe we all do, and maybe there's a good reason. Earthling uses a sci-fi context to explore this sociological situation. Sure the sci-fi constructions are stereotypes... the slug that occupies the brain is straight out of vintage Star Treck, and the space probe seen in the introduction (in black and white) could have come from Buck Rogers. What the director is saying is that this doesn't matter to the story, that the story takes place at a deeper level. As the story evolves, it is aided by strong performances by the two female leads that reflect love, doubt, and duplicity. The male characters and actors are significantly weaker. As above, the effects are not the strength, it is the inner dialog and conflict that matters. The main character makes a journey of a lifetime without moving very far at all, and we come to empathize with a creature that is not at all human, yet reflects us all. 4 out of 5.

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?"