One of the best sci-fi movies ever

1. Are you a David Bowie fan? y
2. Have you ever heard or owned a David Bowie music album? y
3. What's your favorite Bowie track *if you have one? Too many good ones to pick a favorite
4. Have you seen other movies which starred Bowie? If so, how many? not that I recall
5. When was the last time you actually watched The Man Who Fell To Earth? around the time of my original post on this thread
6. Do you watch many science fiction films or just the occasional one? lots

Well I wonder which version you've seen and what year you originally saw it.

When you say it isn't complex or multi-layered it tells me you didn't understand it.

The problem is I can neither prove or disprove how much you took in the first time you saw the film since you will have had plenty of time to read other reviews to gain a deeper insight.

However I doubt you realised the following on your first viewing.


1. Corporate paranoia - the fact the they are watching us whatever we do (or come from) Note the figures seen watching the alien's initial arrival.

2. The central characters aged (except Bowie) although we didn't seem to be moving forward in time much in terms of the era we were in.

3. The time travel sequence where an early farmer's boy perhaps from the 19th century looks up and see's a modern day car.

4. The central theme of disassociation that any of us may feel in a new or alien environment.

5. The human cost of new ideas that can make huge amounts of money - by human cost I mean murder. Yes the fix is in.

I could go on and I do believe that the above were not things you picked up on during your first (perhaps last) encounter with this piece of art.

Now you need to be honest with yourself as I think you're just jumping on the bandwagon with other people who don't like this film without really understanding what it's about.

However I always try to respect other people's views - but in this case I urge you to read more about the film and watch again with so you can relate to its - I would say - poetry.

It's curious how much anger this film is capable of provoking. If you really think the only people who found worth in the Man Who Fell to Earth are deluded Bowie fans, I wonder how you explain the fact that the critical opinion is much more flattering than the commercial one (6.7 on imdb vs 86% on RT). Is there proportionally a higher concentration of Bowie fans among movie critics, than among imdb users?

Now as to the film itself, you're right about one thing: it can indeed hardly be classified as sci-fi. I see that as part of its appeal, though. It's a sort of a hodge-podge of genres, themes and ideas, and the genius of this sort of postmodern approach to adapting what was a more straightforward sci-fi novel lies in the fact that it reflects its protagonist's fractured worldview. As a viewer, your primary identification is with Newton. You're supposed to be confused by it all, but hopefully, by the end of the film, you would have understood the same depressing things about our culture that Newton had come to understand–preferably without turning into a broken alcoholic yourself.

That the film is complex, both in terms of narrative and cinematography, is, I would think, readily apparent to anyone with a functioning pair of eyes and no more than a cursory familiarity with established movie-making conventions. Symbolism, more than dialog, reigns supreme. Huge chunks of the plot are conceptualized through literary and cinematic references: Icarus, Billy Budd, the Third Man, William Blake etc. The narrative is non-linear and the editing deliberately removes all means of measuring the passage of time. It is complex. Now, whether that complexity is justified, or merely an exercise in self-indulgence depends, I guess, on one's point of view, but there's certainly more than the bare-bones alien encounter story going on here. Bowie is on record to have experienced it primarily as a love story. Buck Henry saw it as a metaphor for the great suffering that comes with great genius. Roeg was mostly interested in getting across the idea that life on Earth is already much stranger than anything we may find on other planets. These differing points of interest are largely echoed in the reviews. In other words, the story means different things to different people, much like a complex, multi-layerd work of art would.

That said, art house films tend to be polarizing, even within the realm of their target audience. It's perfectly alright to say you hate a film, but it would be a credit to you if you refrained from making judgments about why someone might like it. For instance, when I first saw the Man Who Fell to Earth, the only thing I knew Bowie by was Let's Dance, and I didn't even particularly like it.

What about those who aren't Bowie fans who rate it highly? Are we just an anomaly? I wouldn't say I dislike Bowie, but I've never really listened to any of his music. The only songs of his I actually know are Let's Dance and Golden Years. (And that's because of the Simpsons)

I'm a big fan of surrealism so this movie worked really well for me. I saw it yesterday for the first time so I doubt it has anything to do with nostalgia either. Different strokes for different folks...