The Man Who Fell to Earth
Amazon.co.uk Review
While other films directed by Nicolas Roeg have attained similar cult status (including Walkabout and Don’t Look Now), none has been as hotly debated as this languid but oddly fascinating adaptation of the science fiction novel by Walter Tevis. In The Man Who Fell to Earth, David Bowie plays the alien of the title, who arrives on Earth with hopes of finding a way to save his own planet from turning into an arid wasteland. He funds this effort by capitalising on several highly lucrative inventions, and in so doing becomes the powerful leader of an international corporate conglomerate. But his success has negative consequences as well–his contact with Earth has a disintegrating effect that sends him into a tailspin of disorientation and metaphysical despair. The sexual attention of a cheerful young woman (Candy Clark) doesn’t do much to change his outlook, and his introduction to liquor proves even more devastating, until, finally, it looks as though his visit to Earth may be a permanent one. The Man Who Fell to Earth is definitely not for every taste–it’s a highly contemplative, primarily visual experience that Roeg directs as an abstract treatise on (among other things) the alienating effects of an over-commercialised society. Stimulating and hypnotic or frightfully dull, depending on your receptivity to its loosely knit ideas, it’s at least in part about not belonging, about being disconnected from the world–about being a stranger in a strange land when there’s really no place like home. –Jeff Shannon.
I’ve been a long term appreciator of this film since it was regularly shown late at night on BBC2 in the 70’s and 80’s. Seeing it on DVD at its full aspect ratio is a revelation though, the composition of the images is wonderful and I kind of missed that on a 4:3 TV all those years ago. This is a quality movie with excellent performances from all the actors, even the bit parts. Anyone who ever claims that David Bowie cannot act should be forced to watch this and then to eat their words because he is quite frankly superb in the part of Thomas Newton. He conveys more ‘other-worldliness’ in a simple gesture than most actors achieve with the full Stan Winston latex treatment. Despite this being an SF film (with no major SFX, just intelligent scripting) it could just as easily be about anyone out of their environment and feeling alone and paranoid. They quite literally don’t make em like this anymore. Instead we get MIB:2. Help!
Rating: 5 / 5
The Man Who Fell To Earth usually gets bracketed as rock movie, a sort of feature-length video in the vein of Prince’s Purple Rain or David Byrne’s True Stories. And to be fair, if Bowie had tried to fashion a cinematic accompaniment to his late-seventies oeuvre, it probably wouldn’t have been that dissimilar to this movie: mysterious stranger, Thomas Newton, arrives on Earth and finds himself overwhelmed, disillusioned and alienated by late-twentieth century Western society. The lines get even more blurred when you realise that one of Bowie’s supposedly more autobiographical albums, Station To Station, was in fact inspired by, and written as a potential soundtrack for, the movie. And as any fan knows, the images of Bowie on both the covers of that album and its successor, Low, are actually taken from the film. So who are we looking at/listening to? Bowie or his cinematic alter-ego?
The Man Who Fell To Earth gets a lot of mileage from this duality but the auteur of this work is Nic Roeg, and the film sees him continuing an ongoing examination of identity and perception that began when the thin white duke was still a one-hit-wonder milking his 15 minutes of fame by doing Stylophone ads. As with Performance, Walkabout and Don’t Look Now, a trauma forces Roeg’s protagonist to undergo a transformation – though the twist is that they’re not aware of it. In Performance a reclusive rock star and a gangster on the run exchange roles; in Walkabout a schoolgirl reverts to nature and enters womanhood after her father’s suicide; in Don’t Look Now a grieving father finds his world becoming increasingly surreal, unaware that he has developed psychic powers as a result of his loss. And in The Man Who Fell To Earth an alien sets himself as up as a businessman, patents various revolutionary electronic devices and amasses a personal fortune so he can build a rocket and bring water back to his dying homeworld. Only he stays too long and unwittingly goes native, his plans thwarted by both our hostility and, crucially, his acquisition of our weaknesses and vices (booze, sex, paranoia, TV, fast food and plain old loneliness).
Naturally it’s a movie of two parts: the first as we watch Newton’s rise and try to work out who he is and what he’s up to; the second when we get the twist that he’s an alien and watch his subsequent decline. As such the title The Man Who Fell To Earth is probably the worst spoiler since James Cameron decided to call his shipboard romance Titanic. But of course, it’s not that kind of fall. Bowie is a higher being, a fallen angel. His tragedy is that he becomes human, that’s all. No big deal to us – we’re born that way – but by his standards something of a come down. This is an adult version of ET if you like, though scratch deeper and you’ll find a re-telling of the story of Christ. Both are visionaries, both try to improve the quality of our earthly lot (albeit Newton through his electronic inventions), both incur the jealousy of the authorities, and both are betrayed and publicly destroyed. But while Christ died and rose again, Newton arguably suffers a worse fate – condemned to remain earthbound, lose his otherworldly qualities, become human and be haunted by what he sees as his own failure. Ironically, at his nadir he becomes the very thing 99% of the population of this planet aspire to be: a pop star.
Hence the shrewd casting of Bowie. Contrary to myth, Bowie isn’t a bad actor. He has screen craft, intonation and the requisite degree of naturalism. But what he doesn’t really do is project. Like Jagger and Madonna, he’s great on a broad canvass (i.e. rock videos, concerts) but when he tries to underplay he comes across as surprisingly slight and hesitant. This isn’t a great quality to have if you’re playing a vampire (The Hunger) or Pontius Pilate (The Last Temptation Of Christ), but it is spot on if you’re playing a fully grown adult taking his first steps on planet Earth (it helps that Bowie was thin as paper and pale as milk – so fragile that slender Candy Clark is able to carry him in her arms). In fact, for a lot of the film Bowie actually seems scared of his environment, and Roeg uses this well. This is, after all, an examination of perception as well as identity; Bowie is the visitor but Earth, seen through his eyes, is the alien world and we are the real aliens, both in appearance (his lawyer (Buck Henry) wears the most outlandish bottle-lensed spectacles – Roeg’s way of suggesting that to an alien this strange glass and metal contraption over his eyes would be quite distracting) and beliefs (the screams of livestock penned up in a passing truck seem as disturbing to him as human screams are to us – an indication that from his point of view four-legged creatures are no higher or lower on the totem pole than us hairless bipeds). It’s a device Roeg used in Don’t Look Now, making that most over-exposed of cinematic locations, Venice, seem unfamiliar and bizarre, and again Roeg applies his abstract approach to montage, here to suggest Newton’s non-linear perception of time as well as counter pointing his experiences with those of a jaded college professor (Rip Torn) whose life he inadvertently revitalises. Indeed, the power of both films lies not in the story per sé but Roeg’s unique interpretation of it. This is visual cinema, not visual cinema in the sense of Lucas or Disney, stripping plot and character down to easily grasped images, but visual in the sense of a director using the camera to impose his own narrative voice over and above that of the actors or the script. Not an approach for the faint of talent. And back in 1976, critics saw this as Roeg’s hubris. In hindsight it was his genius.
Rating: 5 / 5
Fact is stranger than fiction, so when it comes to sci-fi the best films are those which are more “down to earth”.
The Man Who Fell to Earth is, in my opinion, one of the best sci-fi films I have ever seen. Forget all those who describe the plot as being complicated or confused – this is really easy to understand. It is simply the way Roeg mixes flashbacks and unexpected, out of the blue snippets. Don’t try to decipher this film as there are no underlying “messages” to find.
This film is basically about an alien who comes to Earth to swap his advanced technological knowledge for water. His family are dying on his home planet so he doesn’t have much time. Disguised as a human for his own protection, the alien pawns gold jewellery (we guess that gold might be as common as muck on his home planet) to fund the hire of a top lawyer to take on the patenting of his designs. This all takes time, of course, and time seems to take its toll on the alien as he soon discovers that he cannot avoid small temptations such as women and alcohol, even though he locks himself away from everyday life. We soon learn that the alien can watch multiple TV screens at the same time, that he can look into the past and that people from the past can see him. His life on Earth slowly pushes him to the verge of insanity, which seems to have an equal effect on his “girlfriend” as she goes insane with him.
What happens when an alien visits Earth? Watch this film!
Rating: 5 / 5
Nicolas Roegs follow up to his successfull thriller ‘Don’t look now’, was the Science fiction themed ‘The Man who fell to earth’. The role of the main chracter, that of the alien,Thomas Jerome Newton, finally found itself fullfilled by the then most alien of rock stars David Bowie.
Roeg had previously in mind PeterO’Toole and Micheal Crichton as possibles for the role of the icey alien. However, Roeg, who had used Mick Jagger successfully in his earlier film ‘Perfomance’ was attracted to Bowie through his sense of mime and movement on stage and also through Alan Yentob’s BBC Documentary -‘Cracked Actor’ which was aired earlier that year. After Roeg met with Bowie in New York he felt he had found his alien and Bowie, who had been interested in acting since the sixtes and had had some minor film roles, accepted the part.
This film is wonderfully shot and is a visual joy especially in its wide screen format. From claustraphobic interiors to wide expanding landscapes and not least the images of the wonderfully pale and angullar Bowie, who later used some of the images as album covers. A superior and unobvious sci-fi film it deals with themes familiar to the work of Roeg(And to some extent Bowie)- alienation,paranioa,memory and wierd sex! The story line concerns the alien visitor, in human form, who has visited earth in search of resources to save his dying planet. This some-what naive and cold character recieves the affections of a lonely woman,the ‘down home’Mary Lou.(Well played by Candy Clark). Who in one memorable scene carries Newton from an elevator, where he has collapsed vomiting, to his hotel bedroom. Once the alien begins to trust Mary Lou he begins to reveal his true identity which culminates in one shocking scene which was edited out when the film was first shown in the U.S. This is where Newton/Bowie reveals his true hairless, almond eyed physiognomy.(ala:Arnie in Terminator 2)From then on a feeling of entraptment ensues as the alien becomes corrupted and his benign cause esqued.
Roegs Film enchants, puzzles and provokes but one can’t help thinking allegorically of a being alienated and brainwashed by society and unable to save ‘his world’ or that of those around him. If not Roeg’s best film then definitely Bowie’s. One of the best films of the seventies, it is still relevant today and stands up to repeated viewing. Favourite scene: Our alien seated in front of banks of television screens using the remote control, in information overload, before destroying the screens shouts despairingly “Get out of my mind… all of you!”
Rating: 5 / 5
The Man Who Fell to Earth is a science fiction cult film from director Nicolas Roeg (Walkabout, Don’t Look Now). It stars David Bowie as an alien who visits Earth seeking water for his home world which is barren. It is based on the Walter Tevis novel of the same name and this Criterion release of The Man Who Fell to Earth comes with the book as well. There are significant enough differences between the novel and the film that the novel is a worthy supplement to the experience of watching this movie. You will also want to check out the DVD extras in the same regard.
David Bowie is the title character in his only feature role. He is Thomas Newton and he only has to adjust his appearance a little bit to look somewhat human. That is if you think David Bowie even looks human because I don’t, but I do realize he is…I think? Anyway, Thomas Newton rises to great wealth due to his society’s advances in technology and his ability to create enterprises based on his patenting compilations of ideas that his world produced, nonexistent on Earth. He is trying of course to fund the shipment of water back to his home world. Thomas soon meets Mary-Lou (played by Candy Clark). Mary-Lou is your typical girl who introduces him to many of Earth’s temptations. Thomas is soon inhibited by his aberrant consumption of alcohol and his fixation with television. It all has a very negative effect on him. Mary-Lou and his friend Nathan (Rip Torn) both eventually discover separately that Thomas is indeed an alien. After being revealed and after the government imprisons him, Thomas’s inevitable downfall becomes apparent. We see him gradually accept failure in his task and grow increasingly negative in his disposition. He has truly fallen to Earth I suppose.
The big strengths in this film are primarily its cinematography. I like Nicholas Roeg’s other films a lot so I’m aware that this is to be expected. I like the idea of a science fiction art film and overall I can really appreciate the fact that The Man Who Fell to Earth is not as in your face as most science fiction is today and was even back then in the mid 70s. However, this is almost too surreal and sedated for me. It was convincing but there were some long and boring stretches and I couldn’t figure out why exactly, beyond the photography alone. It just seemed a lot longer than the story warranted. Also, I think I can draw the line between gratuitous nudity and appropriate nudity and I’m grown up enough to accept both. The Man Who Fell to Earth has much gratuitous nudity, but that was a sign of the times I guess so it’s partially forgivable. There is more emotion and drive behind Newton in the Tevis novel and it seemed a bit more controlled as an existential piece of work. It doesn’t matter though because with the Criterion release you are getting both and if you like to collect interesting and unique films that will have you talking then this set is worth owning. The film itself would probably get three stars from me but the Criterion release justifies four. It really is an exceptional package. The extras are outstanding and should help answer most questions you will have. Provoking movies like this one, whether they be good or bad, deserve the royal treatment so kudos to Criterion once again.
Rating: 4 / 5