He doesn't know why, but he just keeps living.
What I think about every time I think of this movie is, "Okay, so he was 12,000 years old at the time of Christ". He lived then - now 6 times, and then then-now again.
He was 8,000 years old in Mesopotamia..
Now I can imagine this beloved character in this new, very old, civilization
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_from_Earth
A couple interesting details I learned while looking up that link:
- They released a sequel 10 years later.
- The author also wrote the Star Trek episode "Requiem for Methuselah", which has a similar theme.
The sequel of 2021 Space Odyssey for example, is nowhere near as good as the original but it gives a closure so I like it.
The Matrix 4, definitely not in the same league as the first ones but it’s still good to have IMHO. It’s a nice wrap up.
Is the sequel of this movie really bad? Like ruining the first one bad?
The first movie takes place in a single room as the character confides in a group of professors about who/what he is.
The sequels is much more conventional (multiple scenes, multiple sets), and features a group of students who independently discover who/what he is.
There he mentioned how when the romans were conquering Babylon, it had already had a 3000 year history. So its like similar time from us to the romans, as the relative starts of those two civilizations. Babylon was _old_ and they knew it - who was this young upstart trying to recklessly mess with the natural order?
I can’t even process things like 12-14 _thousand_ years of human civilization…
On the other hand, one could argue the cultures around the North Atlantic are close enough to Roman culture and jurisprudence that we are to ancient Rome what later Babylon was to earlier Babylon?
In the movie he claimed to have been Christ, which that experience put him off trying to do anything really public to try to help people.
By the way it was written by Jerome Bixby https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerome_Bixby who also wrote the Star Trek episode https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Requiem_for_Methuselah which had to some extent the same premise (although a much younger immortal)
on edit: oops, I see diggernet https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31454792 already mentioned the Requiem for Methuselah.
What's more; it's on YT for free.
"The doctor working on the mummy suggests trying to see if the man could be revived..."
But if not, no biggie