As someone who wasn't that high on Another Earth, I was wary going into I Origins, writer-director Mike Cahill's new film. Happily, I Origins corrects several of the problems that kept dragging down Another Earth. It's another dish of sci-fi humanism, but it's far more intriguing and thought-provoking. A few people here at Sundance have compared I Origins to elements of Upstream Color, which is sort of accurate but also misleading. (For one thing, Upstream Color is far superior.) What the two films have in common is a curiosity about the mysteries of life, expressed through trippy (albeit somewhat realistic) science-fiction language. My review of I Origins is live at Screen International.
