The Man Who Fell to Earth

1976 "Power, space, time and a visitor."
6.6| 2h18m| R| en| More Info
Released: 28 May 1976 Released
Producted By: British Lion Films
Country: United Kingdom
Budget: 0
Revenue: 0
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Synopsis

Thomas Jerome Newton is an alien who has come to Earth in search of water to save his home planet. Aided by lawyer Oliver Farnsworth, Thomas uses his knowledge of advanced technology to create profitable inventions. While developing a method to transport water, Thomas meets Mary-Lou, a quiet hotel clerk, and begins to fall in love with her. Just as he is ready to leave Earth, Thomas is intercepted by the U.S. government, and his entire plan is threatened.

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Irishchatter Bowie was really professional at his first role as the alien and seriously, I'm glad he used his own British accent instead of a fake American one because Christ, it wouldn't suit him as an actor/singer. Candy Clark and himself were such an adorable couple and I have to say, the sex scenes were just really sexy tbh!I noticed as well that Bowie kept his Ziggy Stardust ginger colour and it really suits him for this role because Ziggy Stardust was an alien too! Its just so sad that he died of cancer last year and that in 3 days time, it will be his first death anniversary. RIP David Bowie <3
michaelgfalk This is a weird movie, and compelling. David Bowie stars as himself: an alien, fallen to earth, whose moral vision is out of kilter with the humans around him. He is superb. His quietness, timing, movements, and thin otherworldly look are mesmerising. And despite his moral strangeness, he is sympathetic. He is one of the strangest characters in fiction: almost impossible to relate to, and yet constantly evoking our pity.The plot moves in fits and starts. Some moments stretch forever, and then suddenly it races ahead, and we find the same characters thrown together in new relationships. Things seem to be developing in a certain direction, and then suddenly turn and render what went before irrelevant. The whole movie is mysterious. Events are unexplained. Characters' motivations are cryptic. But it is never boring, because it is so suspenseful.It is a poetic movie. Often two or three scenes take place at once, and are spliced with the television Bowie is watching or the things he sees and imagines. Strange images come together. We get a sense of how his mind works, though it is often ambiguous whether all the different things we see are in his mind, or are simply coincidences.I loved this movie, but I found aspects of it less compelling. A subplot develops about the finances of the company Bowie founds, World Enterprises. Like the rest of the film, this subplot is weird, but unlike the rest, it doesn't work. The characters involved are ciphers. Thinking about it the next day, I can begin to see some connections between the subplot and the rest of the movie, but I still feel it was jarring and ill- managed.
robert-temple-1 I have recently seen the director's cut of this film on a large screen in a private cinema in London. It has never been released to the public and it contains 20 minutes of footage which was cut from the released version. It thus runs for two hours and 19 minutes instead of one hour and 59 minutes. The extra footage largely consists of raunchy and highly explicit sex scenes where the actors are mostly completely naked. For those many people I have known over the years who told me they wondered whether David Bowie might perhaps have been so androgynous that he lacked the necessary masculine equipment, I can now give assurance that he did indeed have a male member, having seen the proof up there on the screen. So at least that mystery is now solved. (None of the sex scenes was really necessary, and they all appear to have been a personal indulgence of the director.) This film, or at least the publicly released version of it, is now being seen again far and wide, as we look back in retrospect at the extraordinary phenomenon which was David Bowie. I am reliably assured that the film was screened last month in Greece at the Naxos Film Club, and as the expatriates in Naxos are so near unto Olympus, Zeus shall doubtless shortly be making his arrangements to elevate Bowie to the status of 'Hero', compete with his own cult (which in any case already exists). Another point to make is that this film would never have been made without the determined efforts of David Cammell. He is credited only with 'initial development' but he persuaded Nick Roeg to direct the film and he and Nick jointly chose David Bowie for the lead, which frankly 'made' the film. Cammell should really have had a co-producer credit, but that's the film business for you. (Moral: don't always believe screen credits.) As for Bowie, he was always obsessed with black magic, Aleister Crowley, and a superficial and distorted form of Kabbalah. He was no occult scholar, but he was an excellent occult poseur. In 1972, four years before this film was released, Bowie invented and 'became' the persona Ziggy Stardust, who was essentially an androgynous extraterrestrial who fell to Earth. So I am wondering about the true genesis of this film's concept, frankly. In 1969 my wife and I attended a Royal Command Performance at the London Palladium in which Bowie appeared. After boring us with a song about a young man accused of crime, Bowie then marshalled full-screen NASA special effects of a space capsule behind him and electrified us all with his song 'Major Tom'. The song was released a few days before an Apollo mission reached the Moon, so Bowie had judged the Zeitgeist perfectly. The performance was very upbeat and optimistic and became part of the hope that we all had back then of humanity's future in space. However, in later years, Bowie descended into a gloom and pessimism which would last the rest of his life, and his heavy cocaine addiction in the 1970s certainly did not help his mental state. Whatever one thinks one him, and I am not an admirer of his, one has to admit that he was extremely talented and imaginative, and of course he was a genuine 'weirdo', unlike anyone else. If being uniquely strange is an achievement, then he succeeded in that. I do not generally approve of the narcissistic pop stars who sweep silly people up into the vortices of their self-love like dust sucked into a tornado. I was horrified at the mass-glorification of Bowie by the media at his death. Even the quality newspapers carried pages and pages of adulation about him, as if the monarch had died or a god had returned to heaven. It made me utterly disgusted. Have we sunk so low that we are required to worship mere singers? I suppose it was just another manifestation of what had earlier come out as Elvis-mania, succeeded by Beatle-mania, Rolling Stones mania, and then all the other pop manias which shrieking 14 year-old girls propagate like waves through society. And that is clearly how shallow we are now. Now as to the film itself. Although the film is 'very seventies', there is nothing wrong in that. That's called patina. In my opinion, the film is amazingly brilliant. It is an example of Nick Roeg gone to the limit, and then some. David Bowie is completely convincing as the lone extraterrestrial who has 'fallen to earth' from another world, perhaps because he really believed it. In the story he has left behind his wife and children in a world dying of drought. We see them looking weird and wan in a dry and desolate desert far away in space. Eventually, they lie dead in the sand. He cannot return to them. Candy Clark is brilliant as a simple-minded hotel worker who becomes Bowie's mistress, and her performance is spectacular, ranging as if does over many years and many personality and mood changes. An unscrupulous rogue of an associate of Bowie's in business is well played by Rip Torn. Both Clark and Torn were perfectly cast. Bowie introduces extraterrestrial technology into Earth industry and becomes immensely rich, though he achieves no happiness. This theme played to the widespread rumours in the 1970s that extraterrestrial technology reverse-engineered from crashed UFOs (such as those claimed at Roswell) had been fed into the American military-industrial complex, resulting decades later in such things as military drones and stealth aircraft. In the film, we see this kind of injected extraterrestrial technology acted out on the screen in a casual and matter-of-fact manner by the world-weary and by now decadent Bowie, who like an Amazonian tribesman has no tolerance of alcohol, and is encouraged by his unscrupulous business associates to take up regular heavy drinking.
roddekker I don't think anyone who has seen this flick can argue with this.... Without the intriguing presence of the androgynous, chameleon-like David Bowie in the title role as The Man Who Fell To Earth (TMWFTE), this flick would have never worked half as well as it did.This would be Bowie's first venture into the realm of movie stardom and TMWFTE was a perfect vehicle for him to be showcased in. Bowie was at the absolute height of his musical career as a Pop Idol when he starred in TMWFTE. Needless to say, Bowie's popularity soared to the absolute heavens with his appearance as an extraterrestrial in this flick.TMWFTE is definitely a strange Sci-Fi flick. It doesn't follow the standard formula which most Sci-Fi flicks are based on. There are no alien attacks. No attempts of an alien take-over. No battles (in the physical sense) to be fought. No mass destruction or laser-gun blasting. I know it's hard to imagine any Sci-Fi flick working successfully without at least a few of these standard Sci-Fi elements thrown in for good measure, but TMWFTE works exceptionally well without them.*Note* - On Jan. 10, 2016, David Bowie died, at the age of 69, from liver cancer.