I ORIGINS
DIRECTOR: Michael Cahill
CAST: Michael Pitt, Brit Marling, Astrid Berges-Frisbey, Steven Yeun, Archie Panjabi, Cara Seymour, Venida Evans, William Mapother, Kashish
CLASSIFICATION: 13 LS
RUNNING TIME: 113 minutes
RATING: 2 stars (out of 5)
Theresa Smith
IT MAY have an intriguing starting point, but the sci-fi drama I Origins is so wildly uneven that you just start losing interest.
It give us cool-looking nerds in lab coats and asks supposedly important questions. Everyone walking through the film is so earnest, but ultimately, no one ever seriously questions anything. It is all so terribly endearing and meant to be just so awfully amazing (put in your own exclamation marks), but really, it is just so vague.
Drawing on research into the evolution of the eye, scientist Dr Ian Gray (Pitt) wants to put to rest once and for all the question of intelligent design. Actually, he isn’t doing research to prove or disprove the existence of God, Ian is simply totally into his molecular biology research and wrapped up in thinking about eyes only in terms of said research.
That is, until he meets the beautifully fey Sofi (Berges-Frisbey) who turns his world around, introducing a sense of wonder, superstition and mystery into his rigid little science-box of a world. Especially when Ian compares Sofi to his serious, bespectacled lab assistant Karen (Marling), she comes across as wonderfully Bohemian… or at least just so different when compared to the other bright-eyed young American 20-somethings Ian hangs out with. Because, hey, her hair is a delightful mess, and she has these gorgeous eyes and she doesn’t answer questions with straight answers.
Anyway, it’s all sunshine and white peacocks and frilly dresses, right up until it isn’t. And then it is just sad and mopey, until we fast- forward a couple of years and Ian makes an interesting discovery about eye iris patterns.
Director Cahill spends so long setting up the characters that he runs out of time to tell the story. Just as things start getting interesting, the film ends. And it ends at the point where it should have actually started, when Ian maybe discovers that reincarnation is a possibility.
Like, strangely enough, Million Dollar Arm, this drama introduces the mystical India as THE place to go to for enlightenment and Ian quickly finds what he is looking for, because apparently if you throw enough money at a problem, it will be solved.
And don’t even get me started on that throwaway character of the preacher in the lift at the hotel. Why introduce him if he wasn’t even going to get a chance to do anything?
The whole idea of pitting faith against fact is great, and would make for a great movie, but it never actually happens. First we get lots of facts, and then just when maybe the facts could actually support the faith, boom. The end.
If you liked The East or Wish I Was Here, you will like this.