The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976)

hyped garbage

Good idea lost in the noise

It's fun, it's light, [but] it has a hard time when its tries to get heavy.

Go in cold, and you're likely to emerge with your blood boiling. This has to be seen to be believed.

Exaggerated performances, dodgy visuals and an incomprehensible story. This, however, cultivated a rather cracking experience.

This is a film for the experienced cinephile. An average audience will probably get bored. David Bowie is an alien who lands on earth in search of water. This was the legendary singer's first starring role and he more than owns the role of a strange human trying to mix with humans. The surreal imagery by noted director Nicholas Roeg is a highlight and although the film wasn't a big hit either critically or commercially back when it was released, it has a huge following today. If you are a fan of science fiction you should check this out.

I remember watching it in the late Nineties, when I was 20 or so. I never really got the film back then, feeling that the film made sense up to a point about two thirds of the way through and then seems to lose focus and narrative structure.Having watched it again recently I still feel the same, only now I realise why the film gets so confusing. I won't go to far into it, only to say that there is a jump forward in time towards the end of the film but the world still looks like the mid Seventies. So this passage of time passed me by the first time I watched.Anyway, I digress. The Man Who Fell to Earth features a great turn by David Bowie, who was beginning his coke fueled Thin White Duke period. This really plays into his performance and it's hard to tell where Bowie ends and Thomas Jerome Newton begins.In fact I rate all of the performances in the film highly. I also like the how the film looks. The opening 20 minutes of the film are very atmospheric and really portray how isolated Bowie's alien is.Overall I would recommend the film, with the caveat that this is really science fiction that is particular to the time, as in just before Star Wars came out. It is slow, weird and confusing, and all the better for it

Roeg's imagery has never been more abruptly disconcerting than in The Man Who Fell to Earth. See how the camera flies erratically over the mountains, through clouds and then suddenly exploding into a lake, and how Bowie's profile straggles over the first hilltop like an alien finding his first bearings and adjusting to the new environment. The associative editing that explores this alien mindset has eagerly pushed this film into cult territory. Roeg's sex scenes, which always have a naked vulnerability about them, become thrilling and grotesque as Newton envisions his own species' mating habits. And the frequent, dreamy cross-cutting to his home-world have a tragic spareness to them - the vignetted, home-video filming style fills them with nostalgia. The soundtrack too, buzzes in and out of focus like a broken radio, channelling Newton's own conscious disorientation. Roeg's heightens each scene and its sensations to dizzying lengths - a key scene is the first unveiling of the space vehicle, where the camera sits in the car as it approaches the great big research facility and then through the tunnel. This is accompanied by frenzied harp glissandos as it passes through this modern breach and into the vehicle itself with its luminous spherical centre; it becomes something as mesmerising as the stargate sequence in 2001. A less subtle moment is the sexual reconciliation of an ageing, ravaged Mary-Lou and a near-comatose Newton, set to a loud, overbearing rock song. It becomes a flashy, banging montage, no doubt to compensate for the shallow nature of their intimacy, but it overplays its hand and loses any semblance of its ironic potency. Bowie is of course perfectly cast. It was actually the second time that Roeg had cast a prominent music star in one of his films - Mick Jagger in Performance portrayed a former rock star gone to seed, drugged up and sexually enticing, blurring the gender boundaries within the characterisations. And Bowie's androgynous qualities do a similar thing here, dulling the orgasmic power of the human's sexual activities, like he has never really caught on to the strange act. Early on, Roeg juxtaposes the sexual energy and excitement of Bryce's college conquests with Bowie's piercing, analytical glare. There's a strange, sad irony here - he has amassed a fortune worth hundreds of millions, but his grasp of the human form and mind still infant-like, mimicking as he learns and stumbling into vices. Some might call such a film style over substance, a term I loathe. But the criticisms do have some weight behind them - there's a few tangents that are still confusing to this day, although no doubt a read of the source material could clear things up. Most frustrating is Roeg's lack of engagement with the theme despite his hypnotising visuals; Bowie's performance subscribes to less is more, and although his POV is distorted and snake-like like his true form, there's little to engage with beneath the surface. Roeg touches lightly on ideas that would be interesting from an alien perspective, but never expands on them. Bowie sings meekly in a church while Mary-Lou beams at him, and quickly falls into the vice of mainstream television and alcohol. Well, there's nothing too interesting about that. Millions of people are stuck in the same way.