The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976)

Featured Audience Ratings

• Nicki M

  
  Not sure I entirely understood this, but it's the type of movie you just sit back, watch, and then try and work out what it was all about later! As it turns out, it wasn't about a whole lot, and the ending is slightly unsatisfying, but I could forgive this quite a lot as I… More
  Not sure I entirely understood this, but it's the type of movie you just sit back, watch, and then try and work out what it was all about later! As it turns out, it wasn't about a whole lot, and the ending is slightly unsatisfying, but I could forgive this quite a lot as I loved David Bowie here, perfect as an alien, and there is a type of 70's sleaze all through this that works for its time. Very interesting movie.

• Graham J

  
  An odd film that features a decent performance from one of my favorite artists (Bowie) but the real star is Roeg's direction.

• Sophie B

  
  A very obvious vanity project, it could have been a lot better if they'd sat down and discussed the plot to the minutest detail. Bowie's performance was fantastic though.

• Thomas J

  
  Very interesting 70s idea of science fiction. It takes too long to get to the point, but even then - the point is disappointing. The concept is much better than the product. I enjoyed David Bowie's performance and the fun was in nostalgia.

• AJ V

  
  I should really see this movie again, I didn't get to see the whole thing, but I liked what I did see.

• Daniel M

  
  Philip Ridley once said that “watching a film has always been both an experience and a process; we experience it first and we spend the rest of our lives processing it.” Each of us can cite examples of films which were memorable experiences to watch and which have dogged our… More
  Philip Ridley once said that “watching a film has always been both an experience and a process; we experience it first and we spend the rest of our lives processing it.” Each of us can cite examples of films which were memorable experiences to watch and which have dogged our imaginations since that fateful first viewing. Sometimes the film is so perfect we embrace it and analyse it ad infinitum; sometimes it is so hideous that we are repulsed and vow to avoid that area forever. And sometimes, as with The Man Who Fell to Earth, the experience is just so strange that we don’t know what to think. The Man Who Fell to Earth is a notable meeting point in many interesting careers. It was maverick director Nicolas Roeg’s follow-up to Don’t Look Now, a flawed but fascinating Gothic tale of grief and the supernatural. It was produced by Barry Spikings and Michael Deeley, who would later win Oscars for their work on The Deer Hunter. And it marked David Bowie’s first foray into film, having failed to get an adaptation of Nineteen Eighty-Four off the ground. More than any of that, it is also one of the strangest, oddest and most baffling films ever to have come out of Britain – quite something for the country which gave us The Wicker Man. Roeg’s experimentation with colour, composition and narrative structure takes a relatively straightforward science fiction story and distorts it ruthlessly, creating something which is incoherent and indulgent, but utterly memorable. Based on a 1963 novel by Walter Tevis, The Man Who Fell to Earth is something of a bridge between the drug-induced hippie culture of the late-1960s and the post-Altamont paranoia of the 1970s. Its visual style is reminiscent of Michelangelo Antonioni, particularly The Passenger and Zabriskie Point. Both films rely on long slow scenes with lengthy takes, and the camera is as much in love with the landscape as it is with the characters dotted around it. There are also hints of Andrei Tarkovsky in Roeg’s work. Like The Mirror, The Man Who Fell to Earth plays out like a stream of consciousness with no particular interest in narrative. And as with Solaris, part of what story there is includes a man wanting to rejoin his family on a distant planet. We watch David Bowie’s mind conjure up images of a strange desert world, and are not sure whether we are seeing what is real or illusion, the future or the past. One of the distinctive features of The Man Who Fell to Earth is its complete disregard for the passage time. Characters physically age, but there is no clue as to how much they age by or how long it has taken Bowie to accumulate all his wealth and power. Roeg deliberately sought to remove the “crutch of time” from his audience, a decision which makes the film deeply incoherent. Couple that with the generally slow pace of the film, which runs to two-and-a-half hours when fully uncut, and you would expect the whole project to collapse into a soupy heap. This is avoided by Roeg’s striking visuals which pull us into the world of the film and keep us totally engrossed (if freaked out) by what is going on. Like Ken Russell before him and David Lynch shortly after, Roeg puts images on screen which are so horrifically beautiful that we can be fixated by what is happening even if we have no idea what is going on. The scenes of Bowie’s home planet, inhabited by hairless creatures with air packs and yellow eyes, is up there with the acid queen sequence in Tommy. The Man Who Fell to Earth is a deeply druggy film, right down to Bowie’s entrance which resembles footage of Syd Barrett (allegedly) tripping on mushrooms in a quarry. This psychedelic feel spilt over into the production, since the film was made at the height of Bowie’s cocaine addiction. Perhaps the only way to rationally understand the film is to liken it to an acid trip or lengthy state of drunkenness, in which little makes sense and one has little control over events playing out before you. It’s therefore hard to know whether the film’s indulges with both time and content are deliberately intended to reinforce this effect or are simply a case of poor discipline. By and large Roeg is well-behaved behind the camera, choosing his angles for their propriety rather than to show off his skills as an editor. His use of zooms, while repetitive, does enhance the film, mimicking our wandering minds that focus on something on a whim for no good reason. That said, we do have to put up with the gratuitous shot of Candy Clark urinating in fear, in which the camera focuses tight on her underwear in a really uncomfortable manner. Being an X certificate film, The Man Who Fell to Earth also has its fair share of nudity and graphic sex. We get full frontal scenes of Clark and Bowie, and scenes of Clark and Rip Torn making love in a manner which resembles a mugging. Although none of these scenes are exploitative, they are far removed from the famously delicate love scene in Don’t Look Now. We also have to put up with a parade of teenagers staring at Torn’s genitals and remarking: “you don’t look anything like my father”. But beneath all its incoherence and excess, The Man Who Fell to Earth is an insightful and powerful film about the destructive effects of wealth and the lifestyle that goes with it. Beyond the obvious irony of the story (a man sent to find water ends up becoming a drunk), the film demonstrates how someone of seemingly noble intentions can end up as a bankrupt vessel of decay. Thomas Jerome Newton begins with no emotions and a singular focus on his mission, setting up World Enterprises with the express purpose of helping his planet. But the longer he stays on Earth, the more Newton absorbs the lifestyle and values of our planet until he loses all desire to help anyone. Just as Charles Foster Kane was based on newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst, so there are shades of real life enigmas in Bowie’s performance. The most obvious comparison, aside from Hearst, would be with Howard Hughes. Both individuals are obsessive by nature, with the ability to conjure up wealth and power out of nothing. Like Hughes, Newton entertains the possibility of travel by seemingly unrealistic means. And like Hughes, Newton becomes a recluse who is both tormented and fascinated by film and television. Think of Newton as Kane’s mentally deranged, druggy half-brother – and even then, you’re only halfway there. Much has been written about Bowie’s performance, which is the best of his erratic acting career. Bowie literally inhabits Newton to the extent that he lived the lifestyle of the character long after the film had wrapped. The covers of Station To Station and Low are stills from the film, and Bowie’s persona of The Thin White Duke was in some respects a perversion of Newton’s mental state. His performance is the mainstay of The Man Who Fell to Earth, the touchstone which sustains our attention and prevents us from being completely alienated. His pathos-ridden delivery and unusual beauty pulls us hypnotically into the world of Newton and his various pleasures, and the heartbreak is genuine as he slowly but inevitably falls apart. The Man Who Fell to Earth is a remarkable feat of science fiction which finds Roeg at the height of his powers. It can’t be called a masterpiece, because of its blatant disregard for anything resembling discipline or coherency. But it is a deeply cinematic experience with a sense of ambition and scope which is rare in filmmaking, even for the period in which it was conceived. It holds up both as a bona fide cult film and as the document of a bygone age, in filmmaking and in Western society. It’s baffling, bizarre and utterly bonkers, but never anything less than unforgettable.

• Pierluigi P

  
  I liked the general idea of the film, Bowie's performance; and, only at first, the mysterious, convoluted plot, but after a while I got tired of all that. Overlong and too scattered for my taste.

• Daniel H

  
  Disjointed and self-indulgent, this film conveys its story poorly, expounds lengthily while delivering little of value, and makes brave stylistic moves for styles sake. One may very well argue that the film conveys, if not coherency, then at least the "spirit" of alienation… More
  Disjointed and self-indulgent, this film conveys its story poorly, expounds lengthily while delivering little of value, and makes brave stylistic moves for styles sake. One may very well argue that the film conveys, if not coherency, then at least the "spirit" of alienation and disjointedness that the plot revolves around. In that regard, the film succeeds, but at the blatant risk of disregarding the plot entirely in an attempt to find its "soul." This isn't to say it tells no story... the story is just poorly told, constantly crippled by misplaced cinematic license. This film at its worst fails to tell a story at all, and increasingly this is the case as the film progresses, becoming so enraptured with its capturing the essence of alienation that it alienates good portions of its audience. This film is a cult film, indeed, but a cult film in the truest sense of the word: it is enjoyable to an elite who enjoy its rarity and odditiy, or by those who find kinship with its disjointed, dilated, and eerie essence. Unlike better cult films, there is little being said of value, little that can be gained by investing the time to understand it, and no true narrative (which is merely a foil, an excuse to indulge in an exercise of thematic expression) or meta-narrative (it tackles no real issues or cultural phenomena) to speak of beyond the phenomena of its heavy-handed effect. Over-rated.

• Curtis L

  
  Sorry to say that I got very, very bored with this one. David Bowie is the man, but not enough spandex and too much sex with that same chick.

• Cindy I

  
  Not impressed. Kept waiting for some kind of point that never came. I found myself flipping through a magazine and finding it more engrossing. That's a shame too, because I probably missed a plot point -- I MUST HAVE -- that would have explained things a little better. This is… More
  Not impressed. Kept waiting for some kind of point that never came. I found myself flipping through a magazine and finding it more engrossing. That's a shame too, because I probably missed a plot point -- I MUST HAVE -- that would have explained things a little better. This is another case of being disappointed in a film that I waited years to see. Maybe if I had seen it when I first heard about it 30 years ago, I might have like it better. Oh, and why does Candy Clark always talk like she's 8 years old? Of course, with a name like "Candy" I guess that's to be expected.

• Lafe F

  
  Bleak and depressing. Our planet Earth is not such a fun place for aliens to be stranded in this movie. It's a tragedy alone there's no decent David Bowie songs in this movie.

• Steve B

  
  To be fair, it's been a while. I'd be willing to watch it again, though.

• Cameron J

  
  David Bowie really is a space oddity, and no, I don't mean in this film; I mean in real life, because with those two, different colored eyes and that unhealthy infatuation with space, he appears to not be of this world. It's enough of a dead giveaway that he's so… More
  David Bowie really is a space oddity, and no, I don't mean in this film; I mean in real life, because with those two, different colored eyes and that unhealthy infatuation with space, he appears to not be of this world. It's enough of a dead giveaway that he's so inhumanly white that being given the name Thomas Jerome Newton only made him come off as less white. Wait a second...; Thomas? I guess we now know what happened to major Tom: He got lost in a distant world and earned "fame" among the "cat people" (Boom! Double forced Bowie reference!), who reprogrammed him as their agent to go down to Earth on some bogus water-retrieval mission, when really, he is to earn the human's trust so that they will be more easily crushed by the army of cat people, led by Tom and his cat-hybrid son (Hey, David Bowie's real son, Duncan, looks like some kind of mutant spawn of a man - such as David Bowie is - and a cat). Man, I wish something that exciting actually happened in "The Man who Fell Asleep". Oh wait, that's my story of watching this film. No, the film isn't that slow, but it would appear that Mr. Newton came to the wrong place for water, because this is a dry world if there ever was one. The film isn't terribly quiet terribly often, but the atmosphere is so very dry and meditative; but hey, I will give them this: At least that tone fits the story structure, because so little happens through so much of this film that it's only appropriate that the atmosphere would be as dull as the storyline. To make matters worse, the film is paceless, making every dry or pointless moment palpable, which isn't to say that the pacing is the only thing that they put little effort into making comfortable. If something does actually happen, it often feels like a tacked-on, messily-handled aferthought, and moments like those lapses in effort most often fall upon moments that need it the least, and those are, of course, moments of exposition. Now, there's enough exposition that gets through for you to have some degree of attachment to these characters and their situation, but a lot of significant components of resonance - particularly development of the relationship between our leads - go just barely glossed over, and it really dilutes the impact of an already underwhelming film. The concept is promising and could have been something truly moving, yet director Nicolas Roeg pays so little attention to the substance, but pays extra special attention to the style, bombarding this film with superfluous, overstylized imagery that exacerbates the underwhelmingness of the film. However, at the same time, that style makes the film all the better. As a drama, the film leaves much to be desired, but as spectacle, there's enough intriguing style behind it to keep you engaged, wondering what trick they're to pull next. A deal of the film's emphasis on day-to-day actions taints it with an overdramatic overtone and costs the film believability and, by extension, more substance at points, so if its going to taint itself in order to simply supplement style, it better be some good style. Well, now, this isn't a Terrence Malick level of phenomenal style, where the lack of substance is all but made up for by pure, awe-inspirting spectacle, but the style is still so neatly meditative, the cinematography is so lovely and the editing is so unique that you do very often find yourself gripped and intrigued; maybe not to where you fully forgive the film for its missteps, but enough for you to have some level of engagement. You're especially woken up by the handful of moments of dazzling visual effects and the good couple of moments where they're flaring the pretty awesome soundtrack. Sorry kids, but there's still no David Bowie on the soundtrack (Hey, I'm just glad that means that there's not a chance of us having to hear "Fame", one of the handful of things more dull and dry than this movie), possibly at his own request, because he doesn't want people to forget that he's an actor. Shame he didn't tell the writer (If there even is one in behind this mess), because he doesn't have enough material to make a terribly impressive breakout lead performance, but he's workmanlike enough to keep the film afloat (Though not quite good enough to drown out Candy Clark's awful performance, which isn't to say that that's an easy task for anyone), much like the director. Now, there's so very much that's wrong with the film and so very little, yet there's little, if anything terribly mediocre in the film. I strongly wish that they had given this film the substance it deserves, but there is enough style and charm in its simplicity to keep you going, and it certainly helps that this is still a worthy story, no matter how messily-handled it may be. In the end, the film does a messy job of handling what substance isn't heavily diluted, if not lost in the overstylizing and long periods of nothingness - topped off by dry slowness and pacelessness -, but with a worthy enough story and plenty of strong, appealing stylistic choices, "The Man who Fell to Earth" is left a generally watchable experiment, though one still riddled with deeply unsatisfied potential. 2.5/5 - Fair

• Danny R

  
  A surreal, mystifying sci-fi cult-classic that concerns a humanoid extraterrestrial, played by rock legend David Bowie in a compelling performance who journeys to Earth from his drought-stricken dying planet to save it, and eventually becomes the head of a giant mega corporation, that… More
  A surreal, mystifying sci-fi cult-classic that concerns a humanoid extraterrestrial, played by rock legend David Bowie in a compelling performance who journeys to Earth from his drought-stricken dying planet to save it, and eventually becomes the head of a giant mega corporation, that will build space vessels to bring water back to his world, a chemistry professor named Nathan Bryce, played by Rip Torn in a superb turn begins to suspect that the technology behind the corporation cannot be explained, further complicating matters is the fact that the innocent alien tycoon has become sidetracked from his mission, for he has succumbed to human desires especially sex, booze and television, he capitulates these vices and bodily wants with his earthly bondage, this is a weapon that his captors use to keep control of him. David Bowie plays the phlegmatic alien wonderfully in a smashing screen debut performance, he is endlessly fascinating to watch, his androgynous pale thin body, piercing eyes and radiant orange hair, perfectly personifies a humanistic alien. Fine direction by Nicolas Roeg, stunning cinematography by Anthony B. Richmond, with excellent supporting performances by Candy Clark, Buck Henry, Bernie Casey, Lina Hutton and Jackson D. Kane. Bleak, disturbing, bizarre and totally brlliant, a worth-while motion picture experience for anyone looking for something out of the norm. Note: There are quite a few scenes of full-frontal nudity of both males and females, as well as sexually explicit scenes, that are filmed stylistically. Highly Recommended.

• Mike T

  
  Even if it only exists on a visual level, Nicolas Roeg's sci-fi art film is a dazzling piece of work; but it doesn't just exist on a visual level. Underneath all the strange, dreamlike visuals is an interesting social commentary. I was more interested in the inventiveness of… More
  Even if it only exists on a visual level, Nicolas Roeg's sci-fi art film is a dazzling piece of work; but it doesn't just exist on a visual level. Underneath all the strange, dreamlike visuals is an interesting social commentary. I was more interested in the inventiveness of the movie as a whole... not a single scene is played traditionally, and the overall structure is extremely original. A vivid, bizarre experience.

• Lauren D

  
  I thought I'd like this because it's sci-fi and 'cult-y', but it was just boring and stupid.<br/><br/>All the sex was random, the acting was pretty bad. And it was pointless.

• Ed Fucking H

  
  Not really sure why so many people didn't like this. It was unique and I've never seen anything quite like it before. David Bowie has never been the best actor, but he really shines in this one. Many people often confuse things that are 'unusual' for being… More
  Not really sure why so many people didn't like this. It was unique and I've never seen anything quite like it before. David Bowie has never been the best actor, but he really shines in this one. Many people often confuse things that are 'unusual' for being incorrect or poorly made. Their loss, this film was great.

• matt s

  
  I wanted to like this more than I actually did. There are some scenes and sequences that are beautiful, but it's a bit too into itself. The final 30-45 minutes are pretty damn good. But some choices that director Nicolas Roeg made, instead of telling a straightforward story, were… More
  I wanted to like this more than I actually did. There are some scenes and sequences that are beautiful, but it's a bit too into itself. The final 30-45 minutes are pretty damn good. But some choices that director Nicolas Roeg made, instead of telling a straightforward story, were just perplexing. I can understand being artsy, but sometimes it was just a bit too pretentious for me.

• Steve S

  
  The novel was better.

• alan j

  
  strange and atmospheric, Bowie seems right at home with his persona....a moral tale that just always seems "off"..unusual bit of work but defintely worth watching

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