Review: I Origins
Please note: This article is published as an archive copy from Philadelphia City Paper. My City Paper is not affiliated with Philadelphia City Paper. Philadelphia City Paper was an alternative weekly newspaper in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The last edition was published on October 8, 2015.
[Grade: C-] Like his first film, Another Earth, Mike Cahill’s I Origins attempts to strike a balance between grand ideas and intimate human drama.
City Paper grade: C-
Like his first film, Another Earth, Mike Cahill’s I Origins attempts to strike a balance between grand ideas and intimate human drama. Here he depicts the debate between science and spirituality as a love triangle with a scientist played by Michael Pitt at its center. Pitt’s research deals with the evolution of the human eye, the complexity of which has often been used as evidence of intelligent design. As he makes breakthroughs in the lab with his partner, played with alluring intelligence by Brit Marling, he’s also in the process of falling in love with a model (Astrid Bergès-Frisbey) whose beliefs are less rooted in the rational world. The contrast between hard logic and irrational passion is lyrically, if too rigorously, drawn in the film’s early scenes, but that line becomes fuzzier in the second half, dragging the writer-director’s arguments and the film down with it. An obvious devotee of popular science, Cahill nonetheless manages to do a disservice to both sides, making Pitt’s secular worldview too strident and humorless while giving a pass to hoary New Age name-calling. (Are we really going to let that “playing God” accusation just hang there, unanswered?) Unfortunately, Cahill here amplifies the flaws rather than the promise of his first film, with a conclusion meant to convey ambiguity that feels more like the drowsy shrug at the end of a night of dorm room philosophizing.
