The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976)
Directed by Nicolas Roeg
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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What critics compared The Man Who Fell to Earth to
I’ve seen it compared to Nicolas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976) — a film I love.
The casting of Johansson, too, proves additionally inspired; just as with David Bowie’s Thomas Newton in The Man Who Fell to Earth, the very nature of their iconic presence further distances the notion of mere actors-cum-aliens—they’re already elevated above the clouds in their stratospheric fame.
Wearing a fedora pulled down low—not unlike the one David Bowie sports at the end of Nicolas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth, another touchstone for Glazer’s film—and clutching the hand of Ryan Reynolds, her boyfriend at the time, Johansson barely camouflaged herself, taking the risk that she would not be swarmed.
There are echoes of the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey in this and in the observational alien tale The Man Who Fell To Earth.
Nic Roeg used David Bowie similarly in The Man Who Fell to Earth, but the juxtaposition with ordinary Glaswegian shoppers makes Scarlett – stonewashed jeans and fake fur only marginally dimming her glamour – seem even further adrift than the Thin White Duke.
A direct descendant of Nicolas Roeg’s classic “The Man Who Fell to Earth,” “Under the Skin” is the kind of movie people will be talking about, and dissecting and puzzling over, for years.
Jones, who is David Bowie’s son, explores similar themes to those in his father’s sci-fi classic The Man Who Fell to Earth.
Bowie, you may recall, once starred in a film called "The Man Who Fell to Earth." "Moon" should have been called "The Movie That Fell to Earth With a Thud."
(In this way it's reminiscent of "The Man Who Fell to Earth," a similarly temperate film in which Jones' father, David Bowie, starred more than 30 years ago.)
Except for the gung ho Star Wars crew, film spacemen were suddenly a lonely breed: Robert Duvall's character in THX 1138 (1970), Bruce Dern's plant-watering loner in Silent Running (1971), the fantasy-prone cosmonaut in Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris (1972), and David Bowie's morose alcoholic in The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976) all slept unhappily or alone.
“Don’t Look Now” director Nicolas Roeg nearly made it his follow-up to David Bowie vehicle “The Man Who Fell To Earth; “Sexy Beast” producer Jeremy Thomas struggled to get it made ever after.
Jump and Wheatley chose to locate the action of "High-Rise" in 1975, so their film is a retro-futurist nightmare, full of massive sideburns and shirt collars, as well as orgies and ennui freely inspired by the works of Lindsay Anderson ("O Lucky Man!"), Stanley Kubrick ("A Clockwork Orange") and Nicolas Roeg ("The Man Who Fell to Earth").
But the role of spiritual other half by rights belongs to the starship’s valet: a serenely servile android named David, played by Michael Fassbender in a performance reminiscent of David Bowie’s “The Man Who Fell to Earth,” Dirk Bogarde’s “The Servant” and Peter O’Toole’s “Lawrence of Arabia,” which David studies assiduously to learn how to be human.
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No one else today approaches the genre in quite this way; the only precedent I can think of is Nicolas Roeg's The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976).
And being that Abbie has been infatuated with “The Man Who Fell to Earth” since her teens, there’s also a welcome spot of David Bowie.
Abbie dyes her hair red after seeing Nicolas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth, in which Bowie plays an alien facing an existential crisis after crash-landing on our planet.
The two other women in Jamie’s life are the lodger Abbie (Greta Gerwig), an artist and punk enthusiast who bases her appearance on that of David Bowie in The Man Who Fell To Earth, and Julie (Elle Fanning), the sylph-like but subversive teenager on whom he has a mad crush.
Así, mediante una estética polaroid y una distorsión psicodélica y selectiva de la imagen, nos introducimos en un viaje iconoclasta a través de la irrupción demoledora del punk en la cultura norteamericana, donde los acordes de Blondie o The Ramones propiciaban un incontrolable miedo en las viejas generaciones, al tiempo que el androgismo del glam rock y la hiperbólica teatralidad y dramatismo de Bowie o Alice Cooper hechizaban a las nuevas y las contagiaban de su histeria paranoide, como a la propia Abbie quien, influida por la fuerte impresión que le causó Thomas Jerome Newton, el personaje interpretado por David Bowie en El hombre que cayó a la tierra (The Man Who Fell To Earth, 1976), se tiño el pelo de rojo.
There are echoes of “Solaris” (both the Tarkovsky and Soderbergh versions), “Stalker,” “The Man Who Fell to Earth” and John Carpenter’s “The Thing” in this movie, but it never feels like an assemblage of homage or too familiar, instead producing something wholly unique.
This is science fiction without all the special effects, sort of like the old film starring David Bowie "The Man Who Fell to Earth."
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Carol is like an innocent alien, a cross between E.T. and David Bowie in The Man Who Fell to Earth, driven into seclusion by our intolerable atmosphere.
In order to access Tomorrowland, Casey and Athena will have to seek out one of its former residents, Frank Walker, once upon a time a bright-eyed kid just like Casey, now a grizzled, disillusioned George Clooney living in seclusion in upstate New York, watching the world unravel across multiple cable news stations on a bank of TV screens not unlike The Man Who Fell to Earth’s aerie.