Odd little science-fiction fable about an albino teenager (Sean Patrick Flanery) who has taken the evolutionary leap toward Einstein's envisionment of pure energy, pure intelligence, without the obligatory burden of a fleshly body. Or something like that. The religioso and pomposo tendencies are not out of place in cinematic science fiction (from Frankenstein and its sequels up through The Day the Earth Stood Still, 2001, Close Encounters, Star Trek and its sequels), and the various stages of plot development -- the demonstration of supernatural powers, the confounding of scientific experts, the conversion of nonbelievers -- carry out the generic pattern in gratifying fashion. However, it clearly demands some measure of chutzpah, or something, for a writer-director to posit "the most advanced intellect in the history of humankind" and then to presume to pencil in some words of wisdom for the possessor of this intellect to pass along to us mental pygmies: rather familiar-sounding bromides to do with the connectedness, the oneness, of us all. There can be no doubt that the writer-director in question, Victor Salva, has some measure of chutzpah (a movie marquee glimpsed in the background of a shot boasts the title of his own Nature of the Beast), but this sort of thing comes ill from an artist who himself is several steps below the most advanced aesthete in the history of humankind. Lance Henriksen, Mary Steenburgen, Jeff Goldblum, Missy Crider. (1995) — Duncan Shepherd
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