The Man Who Fell to Earth 4K 1976 Ultra HD 2160p

Story Movie

An alien arrives on Earth in search of water for his drought-stricken planet.

Review 4K Movie

If it hadn't been for Bowie, the film would have remained a cult fetish for film geeks jerking off on their own exclusivity. After laying out on a bed of green leaves plucked from the laurel tree of fame after the success of the undeservedly overrated Don't Look Now, director Nicholas Rogue decided that he had eaten into the secret of success. Audience love happened not from the film's lingering yellow, urine-colored atmosphere, not from Daphne du Maurier's narcotic plot, but from the half-hour-long marital sex scene. It is common knowledge that the longer the scene, the sooner the viewer begins to look for the underlying meaning in it. But Rogue was hardly the first to think of something so entertaining to fill the lingering pause. He approached the CHKUNZ from the height of his new experience, fully confident that he could tell a coherent story solely through coitus.

Let's be honest, yodhtyt, it takes a well-armed or other equally intelligent body organ to implement such a skill. A more incoherent story is hard to imagine. The ecstatically eye-rolling fans of the film, who are guided by Wikipedia info and the synopsis on the cover of the VHS tape, squeeze out your internode fluid or commit some other not-so-human method of seppuku yourself. It's a clear plum why no praise review says anything about all those who surround the film's protagonist and must make up its storyline. Because admirers prefer to close their eyes tightly to the flaws at times.

Noise-gum-tarram, it must have been a spaceship crashing into a lake. Weird guy trades a ring his wife gave him at a pawn shop for a twenty, and then counts out a stack of hundred-dollar bills on the lake shore. Surprised you, too (stole it? Sold it several hundred times to different pawn shops for the same ring?)? Relax, the director imagines himself an avant-garde filmmaker; there was no Lynch to teach a lesson in proper cinematography yet, so every gopher imagined himself an agronomist and every cinematographer a modernist. In a series of episodes, the connection between which can only be found by a hysterical aesthete who likes to write essays on "The Symbolic Significance of Lacquer Floorboards in the Work of the Nineteenth Century Decadents," an alien guy becomes a millionaire by peddling patents for inventions from his home planet, and then some fruit goes to Mexico, where he winds up having an affair with waitress Mary-Lou.

Somewhere two whores are copulating with customers (or is it one customer at different times with different whores - I've never been given that moment), while giving the same speeches about sex with daddies, probably signifying the birth of love between the waitress and the alien. No, if we focus only on the line of Tom Newton himself (aka space monger, aka David Bowie), the dotted line between his naked thighs, we find that the narrative is pretty slim. But what's around Tom is beyond the comprehension of a mind that has never been exposed to lysergic acid. Some professor screwing female students, someone blackmailing (or not blackmailing) Tom's millionaire company manager. And then the moment Tom builds a spaceship and is about to fly home, he is kidnapped.

Once upon a time (imagine that, schoolboy!) there was no internet. My jaw was still resting somewhere in the vicinity of the TV legs. But now you can do a couple of clicks and some more browsing for Uncle Jimmy Wales and find out on the page (just not the movie, but the book) that the government kidnapped the alien and the amateur chemistry professor and turned in the alien to the government (which is what the professor was for anyway!). You think this is a spoiler? Choke on it. At least some of you got the gist of the plot just from the movie, not a single speech on the internet about it. After learning this mystery, I was able to understand for the first time what Rogue was trying to say. Well, there were some questions, like who is the dark-skinned Peters, who appears in exactly three episodes, fucks his blonde wife in the pool and becomes the new owner of the company, but that, rightly speaking, is nothing compared to the sexual revolution of the world...

Rogue's films should be studied by designers to sift through everything about the decade: furniture, interiors, clothing. The visuals are beautiful and moving. But little understood. More to say, pointless. When the manager (the one who was blackmailed or not) is murdered, the kidnappers (ha! so they're government agents) throw him through a window, which doesn't shatter immediately. The boom of the manager's lover (again, government agents visited him. Wearing sequined helmets... Don't ask questions. Don't ask) also flies out the window (it's worth noting that at least no sex is shown between the homo couple manager + security guard, Rogue doesn't back down from his vocation as a militant straight man). A yellow swoop on the overall color scheme and even the urine itself, which, contrary to female anatomy, runs down her leg without staining her underpants, is not forgotten. The grossly accelerated bodies of the nude seventies, the unshaven pubes, the unnatural tantrums of Candy Clark (Mary-Lou). None of this is...a turn-on. The difference is like the erotic confessions in "Phone Sex" and a couple of chapters in the "Sexual Pathologies in Nursing Homes" handbook. With so much nudity and squelching intercourse, it's quite possible to forget that sex was there because your imagination is left indifferent.

But...there's something that made it possible to include the films in stupid "Best Hundred Movies" lists. And the name of the miracle is David Bowie. Extreme thinness and cocaine depth in his eyes. Yes, those who accuse him of barely acting are right. He lives in the movie. He is the alien who fell to earth, who broke his wings, who embraced sin. The creamy sheen of his skin lends aestheticism to the erotic scenes. The tenderness of his caresses with Mary-Lou at the beginning of their relationship is a model of innocence; the long tongue licking the muzzle of the gun, under the flickering light of the blue lamp, when quite a few years have passed, is the best symbol of vice you have seen. Any viewer's sympathy for Tom, an unwanted, angel who can't even manage to become a demon, gave Rogue another chance to win.

A film that intended to touch the genitals actually has an impact on the soul. And only in that it made one believe in the reality of such a hackneyed story -- a man twisted and broken by the Earth. Bowie loses the last traces of resemblance to the human race, transferring not real life into art, but his image of the alien into real life.

Rogue remained so in the seventies, along with their crude fashions and big sweaty bodies. Since the eighties he has not been able to create anything significant. And David... That's funny. Really funny. In spite of this movie. Contrary to the Ziggy Stardust album, where people everywhere rejected the alien messiah, in reality humanity has sung a hosanna to the almost alien David Bowie. It is good to know that sometimes humanity is able to live up to its worst fears.