The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976)

At the time of writ­ing, the world appears to be edg­ing into a pret­ty volatile space. Cap­i­tal­ism is waver­ing. There’s vio­lence in the streets. Rifts are expand­ing between the class­es. The haves care lit­tle for the well­be­ing of the have nots. It seems time­ly, then, that Nico­las Roeg’s 1976 mas­ter­piece, The Man Who Fell to Earth, should return to our cin­e­ma screens on a new 4K restora­tion, as it offers a melan­choly vision of a plan­et that has like­ly seen bet­ter days.

David Bowie is beyond-per­fect as Thomas Jerome New­ton, an alien vis­i­tor on a secret mis­sion to save his home plan­et. The sto­ry, adapt­ed from Wal­ter Tevis’ 1963 nov­el of the same name, sees New­ton exploit­ing his access to futur­is­tic tech­nol­o­gy and fast-track­ing his way to dom­i­nat­ing the glob­al tech market.

His intri­cate plan then involves trans­fer­ring his vast wealth into a space pro­gramme. Yet the film is about all the fac­tors he didn’t man­age to account for – the bore­dom, the lone­li­ness, the rivals, the alco­hol and the lovers. New­ton prizes his pri­va­cy, but dis­cov­ers that even giv­ing a small amount of it away, to ditzy hotel clerk Mary-Lou (Can­dy Clark) and wom­an­is­er turned engi­neer, Bryce (Rip Torn), is enough to light the touch-paper of disaster.

Though Roeg is pri­mar­i­ly known for films such as Don’t Look Now, Walk­a­bout and Per­for­mance, it’s this one which per­haps stands as his most unique, oper­at­ic and com­plex achieve­ment. The use of ellip­ti­cal edit­ing helps it to stride across the years. Time is lost between every edit, giv­ing a real sense of how long this endeav­our takes to exe­cute. Bowie’s rel­a­tive inex­pe­ri­ence as a screen actor becomes one of the film’s key assets, empha­sis­ing the idea of an out­sider enter­ing into a strange land.

The film is extreme­ly pes­simistic, yet the fact that Roeg him­self would be able to go to Amer­i­ca and make a giant, plot­less exper­i­men­tal sci-fi movie is tes­ta­ment to its theme of retain­ing hope even in the dark­est of days.