Fantastic!

If the ambition is to provide two hours of instantly forgettable, popcorn-munching escapism, it succeeds.

There are better movies of two hours length. I loved the actress'performance.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

I like Nicolas Roeg's films although I don't claim to always "get" or enjoy every minute of them. They're always fantastically shot in a crisp, realistic style, he often pushes back the boundaries, particularly with the censors, and they frequently have scenes which stick long in the memory. However, they often seem to have just as many longueurs, with off-beat characters and non-linear narratives. Maybe I'm the problem...Anyway David Bowie here plays a part which seemed to haunt him for years to come, in the aftermath of the film alone, he used images from the movie for two of his album covers, a 12-inch single sleeve while it also seems to inspire tracks on his "Station To Station", "Low" and "Scary Monsters" albums not to mention the famous "Ashes To Ashes" video. Bowie was at an artistic peak musically although off stage he was hopelessly hooked on cocaine, in fact just watch the contemporary BBC Arena documentary on him, "Cracked Actor" and he looks here as if he's just walked on-set from there. So can he act then...?Well if there was one part he was born to play, it was this one, the alien misfit who conquers the world, but to be honest, while he certainly has a presence, you wouldn't say he was extended much. Looks great though.The film stop-starts its way on his space invader odyssey, as he leaves his family life on Mars (or wherever it is) to start inventing items which quickly become society's new fashion must-haves. He picks up, (or rather she does him) an adoring if simplistic hotel chambermaid and garners a back-up team to make him a vast fortune, his target being to amass enough funds to build a spaceship to take him back home. But something happens on his way to heaven as unsurprisingly, he's abducted by government officials, where he's subjected to excruciating tests which wouldn't be out of place in an animal cruelty lab. Resistance however is futile and the mysterious Mr Newton by the end is a washed-up drunk, still resigning himself to his earth bound fate. In one of the film's most telling lines, he forgives his captor-torturer, as he admits his own race would gave treated a visiting earthling in the exact same way.There's solid back-up to Bowie's central role with a variety of convincingly portrayed stock characters. Roeg pushes the permissive button pretty far here with more than a smattering of nudity in the sex scenes, not ignoring the fact that males frequently get naked too when being intimate. I would still say there were too many scenes which for me played like Bowie's own cut-up method for lyrics at around this time, by which I mean I found them puzzling, strange and unconnected. And why no Bowie soundtrack?Still, an interesting if confounding movie, as strangely addictive in its way as television is to Newton.

Something falls out of the sky. A strange man claiming to be British citizen Thomas Jerome Newton (David Bowie) walks into a small town. He begins a rise with only $200. He hires lawyer Oliver Farnsworth (Buck Henry) and creates a giant high-tech company worth $300 million. It's still not enough for his mysterious goal. His motion sickness gets the best of him in a small town hotel elevator. He is rescued by hotel worker Mary-Lou (Candy Clark) who begins to help him acclimate. She becomes his companion. Meanwhile, scientist Nathan Bryce (Rip Torn) is suspicious of Newton. He gets fired for his womanizing among other things. He gets hired by Newton's company. He's invited to meet Newton out of the blue.On the one hand, it is ambitious in its snap editing, otherworldly jumps, and David Bowie is the perfect alien man. The writing is intriguing sci-fi. On the other hand, the directing is not exactly good. It's trying to do something but there is no drive or intensity. David Bowie is compelling mainly because he's playing an odd spacey David Bowie character. This deserves its cult status and it's a fascinating watch for Bowie.

Roeg's imagery has never been more abruptly disconcerting than in The Man Who Fell to Earth. See how the camera flies erratically over the mountains, through clouds and then suddenly exploding into a lake, and how Bowie's profile straggles over the first hilltop like an alien finding his first bearings and adjusting to the new environment. The associative editing that explores this alien mindset has eagerly pushed this film into cult territory. Roeg's sex scenes, which always have a naked vulnerability about them, become thrilling and grotesque as Newton envisions his own species' mating habits. And the frequent, dreamy cross-cutting to his home-world have a tragic spareness to them - the vignetted, home-video filming style fills them with nostalgia. The soundtrack too, buzzes in and out of focus like a broken radio, channelling Newton's own conscious disorientation. Roeg's heightens each scene and its sensations to dizzying lengths - a key scene is the first unveiling of the space vehicle, where the camera sits in the car as it approaches the great big research facility and then through the tunnel. This is accompanied by frenzied harp glissandos as it passes through this modern breach and into the vehicle itself with its luminous spherical centre; it becomes something as mesmerising as the stargate sequence in 2001. A less subtle moment is the sexual reconciliation of an ageing, ravaged Mary-Lou and a near-comatose Newton, set to a loud, overbearing rock song. It becomes a flashy, banging montage, no doubt to compensate for the shallow nature of their intimacy, but it overplays its hand and loses any semblance of its ironic potency. Bowie is of course perfectly cast. It was actually the second time that Roeg had cast a prominent music star in one of his films - Mick Jagger in Performance portrayed a former rock star gone to seed, drugged up and sexually enticing, blurring the gender boundaries within the characterisations. And Bowie's androgynous qualities do a similar thing here, dulling the orgasmic power of the human's sexual activities, like he has never really caught on to the strange act. Early on, Roeg juxtaposes the sexual energy and excitement of Bryce's college conquests with Bowie's piercing, analytical glare. There's a strange, sad irony here - he has amassed a fortune worth hundreds of millions, but his grasp of the human form and mind still infant-like, mimicking as he learns and stumbling into vices. Some might call such a film style over substance, a term I loathe. But the criticisms do have some weight behind them - there's a few tangents that are still confusing to this day, although no doubt a read of the source material could clear things up. Most frustrating is Roeg's lack of engagement with the theme despite his hypnotising visuals; Bowie's performance subscribes to less is more, and although his POV is distorted and snake-like like his true form, there's little to engage with beneath the surface. Roeg touches lightly on ideas that would be interesting from an alien perspective, but never expands on them. Bowie sings meekly in a church while Mary-Lou beams at him, and quickly falls into the vice of mainstream television and alcohol. Well, there's nothing too interesting about that. Millions of people are stuck in the same way.

How you feel about this movie depends on what you want out of it. I have two disclosures to make: first, I write reviews short and sweet, with the intention of countering those people who give mediocre films 9 stars out of ten because a film speaks to them in some way that it will not speak to others. Second, I am a die-hard Bowiephile.I watched this movie over and over and over again, for the sheer love of David Bowie. That said, I don't think this is a great film. In a few ways, its terrible. Most significantly, the screenplay and direction don't match well enough to make a very coherent or intelligible movie. It feels cheap and disjointed. If you haven't read the book, it will not make much of sense. As for performances, they are hit and miss. Bowie, many say, was exactly in his element doing this film in 75/76 when he was truly an alien living in L.A, wacked out on cocaine and out of touch with real life. How much he really acted was debatable-but if you like Bowie, seeing this film is a must. There are a few great visuals, including the cover shot used for the album LOW. This movie would have been better with a different director in my opinion, but it is what it is. A snapshot in time