max von meyerling Review of The Man Who Fell to Earth

The Man Who Fell to Earth (1987 TV Movie)

Awful example of how hacks reduce a film classic into a cheesy TV movie of the 80s variety.

[3/10 · 3 December 2010]

Textbook example of how a classic film can be screwed up into a hack TV movie. The thing that is the most obvious is that everything is pitched to the materialist aspirations of a TV audience. The woman is a New York artist, a flaky non-stop talker single mother (just like them), with a delinquent son, who lives in a huge Soho loft on Broadway no less. The relationship between mom and the son is a big plot element. Everything seems reduced into a small domestic situation. When she finds out that the neighbor who shows interest in her and her son is the head of a big corporation she gets angry that he's so rich. Yeah, its that sort of a film. And for a "timeless" story its embarrassingly anchored in a moment in the 80's. It panders to a low bow middle American TV audience who want to be reassured that this is the way it is "there" among "those people". The kids with boom boxes on roof tops, people dressed as spacemen in discos, giant lofts with lackadaisical artists daubing here and there at a canvas. Its as phony as the dubbed in traffic sounds in outdoor street scenes. Its just another job to be walked through. No one, from the director or writer down to the smallest bit actor actually believes that there doing anything of worth. Before I found this surfing on a weird cable channel in the afternoon when I ill never knew it existed. I can recommend this for film students who want to line these two films side by side to see how the business works. And P.S., I just hate that low key, wall to wall, synthetic piano noodling in the background, SOP for TV movies. Its just a different audience for an 80s TV movie than an early 70s theatre film and the differences are definitive of how to pander to the former. Of course today, 25 years later, they know better how to pander to the more ADD affected audience with such concoctions as LOST. Look up Bobby Roth's filmography and there is a list of hip but soon abandoned semi sci-fi TV featuring shorter but more intense scenes. The same old same old endlessly reshaped and sold.