The Man Who Fell To Earth Review

The Man Who Fell To Earth (Nicolas Roeg, 1976) stars David Bowie as an alien who comes to Earth to harvest it's water for his planet, which is in a drought. Along the way, the audience experiences American culture along with him. And experiencing it from an alien's point of view creates a complex and intricate look at how humans live. Bowie plays the character brilliantly, and he has an excellent hair cut. It fits the style and tone of the film. At times it is filmed in the slightly shaky, yet close up feel of the handy cam; almost like Darren Aronofsky's The Wrestler, but with a ton of Kubrick's crazy colors, massive vision of time, and psychoanalytic theories. With quick zooms, pans, intercutting, and special effects, this film does not fail to visually stun the audience. 

At two hours and twenty minutes, this film's best aspect is it's complexity. Bowie's alien alias is Mr. Newton, and he is superior to almost every human as he sits back in front of numerous televisions and watches humanity unfold in front of his eyes. He sees into multiple periods of time, and the film's narrative reflects that as it jumps through time in disorienting ways. Newton obtains extreme wealth by presenting Earth with new technologies and is planning to return home to his family back on his home planet. The character is tormented by the distance between his family and the distant created between the characters he encounters on Earth. There is a great sense of loneliness and alienation in the film. While he would seem to remain separate from human interaction, he gets caught up in nearly all of it. Love, sex, violence, alcohol--the true wonders of human existence. Two paralleling sex scenes occur toward the beginning and end of the film, one intercuts between Samurai swords being swung and the other intercut by gunshots as the two engaged in the scene fire blank shots at each other. What are humans good for? The intimacy of sex and violence, the fact that we duplicate our existence in the media for aliens to analyze, or the fact that we are a constantly growing species that fights the inevitability of change? The film explores many aspects of humanity from Freud's psychoanalytic theories to religion. The title of the film even suggests Newton's connection to God in the film as his replacement human "wife" is religious and worships the character constantly throughout the film. She believes "God has to be out there somewhere" as she gazes into the sky. Well, looks like he fell to Earth. Only he is as flawed as humanity. A traveler on quest for water, he constantly consumes water, but this soon gets corrupted into the need to consume alcohol. Humanity's imperfections even manage to creep onto this "supreme being." He never ages, but the characters he knows grow pathetically around him. They change their values, and desires. Sometimes they try to force the past to exist again through Newton, who can see all of time in front of his eyes. 

While the film is incredibly dense and warrants a second viewing to get it all straight in one's mind, the film does fail to answer it's questions at times, and remains in ambiguity. It does not necessarily hurt the film, but the viewer can easily get confused and frustrated with a film that tries to deal with so many issues. And it feels like a very long film. Every detail Roeg added in seemed necessary to him, and the details add up to a massive amount. He was trying to do a great deal. There is no way the viewer can digest everything going on in this film, but the amount of what is being thrown in there is very apparent. For better or for worse. Nevertheless, this film is great. And it's style seems fresh, even when comparing to movies coming out today. For coming out in 1976 it seems timeless. Like the editing, which leaps through time and gazes into the future, so does this very film itself as it seems very much like a 70's film, very much like a 50's film, and very much like a film to come out in two years from now. I have not developed a definite rating system yet, but I highly recommend seeing this film, for its complexity, for its style, and if for nothing else, its experience as a whole. I mean, we are taking about Bowie here. As a moody, hipster alien. With red hair.