The Man Who Fell to Earth
Synopsis
An alien lands on Earth to source out water for his dying planet. He starts a highly advanced and profitable tech company in order to build a spacecraft to transport the water. His plans are threatened when the government intercepts. Featuring rock legend David Bowie, in his acting debut.
Our take
David Bowie somehow found time amidst his iconoclastic recording career to put this extraordinary, alien performance to film. This was a perfect meeting of minds: Nicolas Roeg, the great experimenter of narrative forms, and Bowie, the undefinable mystery, together conjure up a masterwork of sci-fi.
Bowie is so extraordinary-looking, with his translucent different-colored eyes and his lean ivory-skinned body, that Roeg revels, visually, in his disorienting presence: the reality of it, its strangeness and beauty.
Sheila O'Malley
January 02, 2019
The indelible image of Bowie watching a half-dozen televisions at once in a gin-addled stupor signifies beautifully in terms of Newton’s personal and cultural alienation—his attempt to understand his adopted environment through mass media—but it’s also a witty, suggestive emblem of Roeg’s kaleidoscopic M.O., except that here the character (and the audience’s) concentration is being dispersed instead of directed.
Adam Nayman
July 27, 2018
It’s exceptionally allusive, replete with references to painting, literature, and cinema. Like its source material, the film invokes the myth of Icarus in ways subtle and overt—from its very title to a prominently displayed coffee-table book that pairs W.H. Auden’s poem “Museé des Beaux Art” and Breughel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus.
Budd Wilkins
January 25, 2017
Related films
2001: A Space Odyssey
Stanley Kubrick, 1968
Holy Motors
Léos Carax, 2012
Stranger from Venus
Burt Balaban, 1954
The Image
Michael Armstrong, 1967
The Glass Shield
Charles Burnett, 1994
Starman
John Carpenter, 1984
Don't Look Now
Nicolas Roeg, 1973
Performance
Nicolas Roeg, Donald Cammell, 1970
Bad Timing
Nicolas Roeg, 1980
Solaris
Andrei Tarkovsky, 1972
Walkabout
Nicolas Roeg, 1971
Under the Skin
Jonathan Glazer, 2013