A humanoid alien arrives to New Mexico. He appears as an Englishman, Thomas Jerome Newton, and sells rings at a pawn shop to get money. With the money, he hires lawyer Farnsworth to patent a self-developing film and found the World Enterprise Corporation, earning more than 300 million $. Newton accumulates more wealth through his patents, to finance a spaceship that he will pilot to bring Earth's water to his dying home planet, a desert, where his wife and two kids await. Newton starts a relationship with a hotel assistant Mary-Lou and beecomes addicted to alcohol. The US government finds out he is an alien and abducts him, performing tests on him in a laboratory. When they cannot find anything, Newton is released. Scientist Bryce tracks down Newton who made a recording of radio signals and is selling them in a store. Newton is stuck as a human on Earth.
Walking a fine line somewhere between ambitious and pretentious, challenging and autistic, cryptic and incomprehensible, Nicolas Roeg's surreal sci-fi art-film "The Man Who fell to Earth" still seems modern today, but not that fresh. Long before the wave of movies about aliens visiting Earth in the 80s, such as "E.T.", "The Brother from Another Planet" and "Starman", this cult film depends a lot on the inclination and taste of the viewers, since those expecting classical narration will like it less, yet despite Roeg's experimental editing playing with ellipses, the story seems mostly consistent from today's perspective. For instance, in the opening act, we see the alien Newton (a very good David Bowie) selling a ring at a pawn shop. Cue to next scene where Newton gives a large number of cash to a patent lawyer to patent a new invention. Cue to next scene where a couple is playfully kissing and cuddling, they make a photo, and instantly the self-developing film shows their photos. Despite some gaps, everything is perfectly clear so far: Newton uses his alien technology to create a company with new inventions and accumulate himself wealth, with the ultimate goal of transporting water to his dying desert planet. All this is, ultimately, congruent and logical: the disorienting approach is there to show the perspective of this alien in a foreign world, and transmit this "weird" feeling through unusual editing and framing.
Roeg, though, is very honest with intimate scenes, and thus the love moments between a naked Newton and Mary-Lou (a fantastic and underrated Candy Clark) feel so genuine. The movie abounds with bizarre moments. Sometimes, maybe even too much. Around 45 minutes into the film, Newton is driving in a car with Mary-Lou talking, while he has a random flashback to his home planet, a desert with himself, his wife and two little kids in spacesuits, and a yellow triangle house with a nylon above. The two best sequences are the one where Newton emerges from the bathroom naked, finally revealing his alien body, with a silver skin, bald head and hypnotizing yellow eyes, as Mary-Lou is so freightened she runs away. However, she stops in the hallway, he passes by and there is a close up of her urinating from fear. He lies in bed, and Mary-Lou takes her clothes off and still goes towards him, nontheless. She longs being close to him, regardless who or what he is. In the other, the patent lawyer is thrown out from the window of the skyscrapper, and the camera spins around its axis as it follows his body falling from the sky—cut to a match cut of another scene of a man falling into the swimming pool. The final act is a disppointment, though. We needed more of a punchline than the anticlimactic ending we got. One interpretation of the story is maybe a symbol for every human being born on Earth: every child is an "alien" and the world is new and strange to them, and then undergoes all the phases of process of life (finding a job, gaining independence, love, success, alcoholism, betrayal, failure, acceptance of decay). Overall, though, the main theme still stands—a person passively accepting misery and disappointment as something inevitable in life.
Grade:+++
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