Opiniões dos críticos

The whole film is amazing visually and sometimes verges on being a B-movie. It doesn’t withhold the fun element of an alien movie. But it’s so emotional because it’s about this character who doesn’t know how to be a person and is trying to learn what humanity is. There’s a playfulness to it but also so much darkness underneath.

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.

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.

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.

A blessing, a curse, a dream, a nightmare. Bowie's penetrating otherness in the film – often overlooked by other characters because of his status – is what makes it so moving and so honest. By placing him in the lead role, the film strays from its science fiction roots (is it the least science fictiony science fiction movie ever made?) and becomes a more cerebral and delicate study of what it means to be disconnected and alone.

Only David Bowie could be said to be typecast in the role of an aloof alien conquering the world through cultural innovations. Roeg's typically impressionistic structure frames the extra-terrestrial's benign invasion as War of the Worlds as written by Marshall McLuhan, in which the creature enchants humans with gimmicky technology while ultimately succumbing to the homegrown pathogen of television.

Time is warped to the point that days, months, and even years vanish between scenes, and just when things begin to feel stagnant, the viewer is bombarded with a neon lit alien sex scene right out of a Jodorowsky graphic novel. A film that could have only been made by a foreigner, [it's] a twisted fun house mirror image of post-60s America in which even the most far out of outsiders embraces the ways of the establishment: capitalism, religion, and the imbibing of copious amounts of gin.

Resnais directing I Married a Monster from Outer Space (with a soupçon of Corman's Not of This Earth) is what is needed here, and that's precisely what Roeg provides, an experiment touching on intergalactic irony and the deepest inner disconnection, a work of telescopes and microscopes.

35 years forward it's still a film that never really knows quite where it's going (though the last shot, which looks like something out of a John Ford film, albeit on top of a skyscraper, somehow makes everything feel complete), but its violent sense of being out of place makes it both very contemporary and very fragile.

The film is undeniably long, Panavision-wide, but of questionable depth. While immortalizing Bowie's mantis-like exoticism, Roeg fails to connect to the longing for family reunion that drives the plot. Domesticity is more vividly imagined as part of Earth society's sickness, defied in a preposterous moment where Bowie slo-mo slaps a tray of chocolate-chip cookies from Clark's hands. Like her, the viewer sticks out the bad for a chance at the extraordinary; Roeg's images are nearly reward enough.

It may be time to stop calling Nicolas Roeg's sexed-up sci-fi film that vaguely demeaning term---a cult classic---and start addressing it as what it is: the most intellectually provocative genre film of the 1970s... The tale is one of a meltdown, situated in a real-life national moment straddling paranoia and the inviting horizon; you can easily hold it up to Nashville, orange hair and all.

Man Who Fell to Earth is an aggressively imperfect film, alternately beautiful, mystifying, and embarrassing, and it's a film to be treasured as much for its ambitious failures as for its successes. Like Icarus and Newton, Roeg sometimes aims for more than he's able to accomplish, but the moments where he approaches the sun are glorious.