An alien arrives on Earth in search of water for his drought-stricken planet.
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By 1976, when Nicholas Rogue’s “The Man Who Fell to Earth” was released, humanity had had time to venture repeatedly into space, visit the Moon, and even had time to wonder why we needed to fly across the universe if life remained as banal and trite as it was, there was enough to do on Earth, and we understood nothing in ourselves or in those around us? The era of enthusiasm for the possibilities of the human mind has passed, mass communication has become a way of disconnection, the Summer of Love is over, and after the tumultuous outburst came the fall, in simple terms “withdrawal”, as after drugs, sex and a raucous party. That’s why in Rogue’s film, which projects the mood of the mid-’70s decadence era from reality to cinema and vice versa, no one flies to the stars, but instead only falls down.
The screenplay is based on a novel by Walter Tevis, though it might as well be said that the plot is virtually a retelling in movie language of the contents of David Bowie’s album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust & The Spiders From Mars (1972), whose theme was the solitude of a humanoid messiah in an alien world. Naturally, it was impossible to find a more authentic performer than Bowie for the role of Cecix, a space alien with an English passport named Thomas Jay Newton, who was forced to live among the common people, although by that time he had already bid farewell to the image of Ziggy. He conveyed his ethereal essence with remarkable authenticity.
The alien, with his multi-colored eyes staring through the horizon, a strange and terrible sign of his split essence, takes the familiar world out of its precarious balance, refracting and manifesting its properties, like a self-revealing film, for which he received a patent in an earthly law firm. He is the point where all paths converge, the generator of hitherto impossible takeoffs, power lines and events. But business, money, all the meaningless, petty desires that become the causes of big dramas, he is not interested in – he is pathologically impractical and kind. He is as if above the fray, the sea of human passions and vices, in which the earthly inhabitants bathe not without pleasure. In a world occupied by obsessive images that fill empty souls and deprive him of the opportunity to live a simple, real life, all his thoughts go somewhere through apathy, age crises and concern about daily bread. And the seas, he is interested, yes, only real ones, in pure, living water.
But the third planet from the Sun, has a basic property, which somehow forget all the dreamers, the Rolling Stones, the Tumbleweeds and other wanderers in the universe – to attract all objects to themselves, painfully hitting them on its surface. And driven himself to the top with a rarefied air of loneliness, refuting all the unshakable laws of earthly space and time, Tommy can not resist only one thing – the law of gravity, and on Earth everything is connected. This world, many will stir, chew, swallow, and spit out. Some will fall literally headfirst into the passage, some will fall figuratively into betrayal, cynicism, or powerlessness. Some will remain lying there, some will sink and wipe out, some will rise to go on, hiding their tears and addictions. With each frame in the atmosphere, the film becomes more and more imbued with moods of degradation and decadence, everything is corrupt, everything is dreary, water will be replaced by stronger drinks, and sugary human happiness will begin to reek of stench as it approaches…
Rogue’s faceted vision mirrors this whole story of disappearing romance and something weightless but important, bombarding the visuals. The purest cinematic imagery swoops over the viewer and, at first, seems assembled in a completely random way that makes you want to scream like the main character, exhausted from watching multiple televisions at once – “Get the hell out of my mind.” But every scene, every millimeter of frame works for the overall plot and the film clashes grommet to grommet – an almost mathematical precision that gives birth to Cosmos out of Chaos. Yet strangely enough it is difficult to comprehend in a meaningful way. Well, it’s just that nature has arranged it so that not everything can be understood by the brain-the world is big and the head is small. And Rogue, as if signing off on the impossibility of understanding this planet, the thing-in-itself, simply pulls out a herbarium of dreams, thought images, sensations, creating a kaleidoscope of fading faces, events, scenery, identical to the perception of the main character.
Whereas in the same “Skies Over Berlin,” the camera admires this world and however vanity and petty it may be, this Earth is definitely worth falling on, in Rogue’s film, through the filters of meaningless drunken conversations, silly TV shows, vulgarity, endless information and stultifying entertainment, there are such obvious dull quotes on “humanity” that the question of value seems so absurd that it is strange to even mention it. But the scariest thing is that despite the gushingly sad end on the terrace of the outdoor cafe, the pile of drinks, the trampled crystal locks and the inhumanly sincere feelings – the question has been asked.
After all, to be honest, no matter how bitter, nothing ends after the collapse of all your illusions, and the human heart is a very strong thing, it’s just not clear what forces it takes to break it finally… Even after these simple truths of life are brought to you by specific people, you can continue to see something good in them – aliens remain aliens to the end. But it is only by falling to Earth and receiving as a black mark the human view of things that one can understand how daily Earth humans get up and survive after all their little and big falls. And hiding your eyes behind dark glasses, stay wandering the Earth, looking for answers to glimpses of ill-formed questions, turning the experience into a new mask or music that will never reach its addressee…
Info Blu-ray
Video
Codec: HEVC / H.265 (84.9 Mb/s)
Resolution: Native 4K (2160p)
HDR: Dolby Vision, HDR10
Aspect ratio: 2.35:1
Original aspect ratio: 2.39:1
Audio
English: LPCM 2.0
English: Dolby Digital 2.0
German: LPCM 2.0
Subtitles
English SDH, German.
