Terence Stamp ended several years' meditative retirement from acting for...this? Hm. Best-known only for being extremely hard to see (apparently it was actually thought a "lost" film for a while), this fatuous French vanity project has him as a figure of reclusive mystery named, er, Terence Stamp, a famous movie star who's hidden from the world since his wife's mysterious (natch) death. Ex-girlfriend Jeanne Moreau coaxes him into participating in a scientific space-travel experiment in which the emotion an actor can project/elicit will somehow make him "reveal the future like an oracle" for a "worldwide audience." In each inner-space adventure he must die, via drowning, avalanche, or whatever.
The concept is as vague and pretentious as it is silly, and lamentably presented without any humor whatsoever. This is one of those films in which wondering just what drugs the creators were doing when they conceived it is more interesting than anything onscreen. Stamp has rarely been so stilted-never let an actor play themselves as Futuristic Jesus Christ, usually clad in all-white, I guess. The whole enterprise is 1970s Europudding indulgence at its absolute worst, a glossy but entirely empty exercise in pseudomystical woo-woo that could not possibly have appealed to anyone outside the bubble of jet-set art dabblers like the filmmakers themselves.
This appears to be the only narrative feature by its director, and no wonder. Unless you want to see a longhaired Stamp running around or looking "meaningfully" confused in various exotic locations for no particular reason (imagery that would have been better as the actual expensive fashion shoot that they feel like), apparently making up scenes as he goes (was there even a real script?), there is nothing here to hold attention beyond sheer curiosity value. The film reaches for a kind of enigmatic pictorialism that someone like Tarkovsky or Antonioni could manage. But here you find out what that aspiration amounts to without any depth whatsoever behind it: Pure upscale-magazine-shoot affectation, rich people striking poses in settings (lava flows! glaciers!) it no doubt cost a lot of $$ to transport a crew into, believing that shooting an actor looking monkish in a remote locale MUST be "spiritual," right?!? By the third or fourth time Stamp was filmed laying on the ground, then emitting one of those all-purpose "God why hast thou forsaken me!!!" yells, I started to find it hilarious. Unfortunately, "Hu-Man" is mostly waaaaay too boring to keep those unintentional laughs coming. (Note: What I saw seemed to be the 86-minute version others have reported seeing. God only knows how excruciating the longer original version was, if IMBD's runtime is correct.)
The sci-fi aspect is basically confined to dialogue, the story is nonexistent, the vibe at times comes close to the abstraction of a video gallery installation or something like without actually making the commitment to fully break from commercial norms. So, ouch, it's just a pointless ordeal. Many years after this was made, I saw Terence Stamp speak at a tribute event for him, and he was absolutely hilarious in spinning anecdotes about his career. I wonder what he would have said about this film, if asked-it's hard to imagine he ever took himself so seriously, in such a vacuous fashion, again.
