EARTHLING, though obviously low budget begins with a curious patience, holding back, etc. About a half hour into the movie, I was optimistic that I would be getting a more cerebral, subtle take on the "aliens among us" genre. The sparse dialog, low key characters and mundane setting set me up for a "thinker" flick devoid of the clichés attached to the traditional "They are here!" junk. Though EARTHLING neither falls apart nor totally sells out, it does cave-in to the inevitable contrivances. It's as if the screenwriter simply got tired and needed to finish up without time for his original vision. The female lead, it should be noted, is very intriguing and manages to hold the film together to some degree. If EARTHLING had finished what it started (and had twenty minutes shaved) it could've amounted to something.

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.

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.

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?"