The Man Who Fell To Earth (1976) *****
Nicolas Roeg's 1976 avant-garde sci-fi masterpiece, The Man Who Fell To Earth, only gets better with age. I've read Walter Tevis' 1963 novel and, while I think it's very good, Roeg's film is a singular experience and one that makes the case that sometimes films can be better than books. David Bowie's film debut is a role that was made for him. I quite literally cannot picture another human being who could have portrayed an alien the way he did.
TMWFTE is quite a long, slow picture with seemingly sudden shifts in logic. Some might find the movie scattershot. Personally, it all just gels perfectly for me. It works in many ways—as a comment on capitalism, depletion of resources, and otherness; as a mirror image of our modern world; or simply as a bizarre, visually stunning, surrealist head trip.
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