The Man Who Fell To Earth

Chiwetel Ejiofor plays a new alien in The Man Who Fell To Earth but his already-known destiny is a miscalculation compared to David Bowie's role.

In Showtime's The Man Who Fell To Earth, Ejiofor plays a different Althean, named Faraday, who comes to our planet to finish the mission Newton started, as well as save the Earth itself. Unfortunately, the evolved version of The Man Who Fell To Earth comes off as an Elon Musk/Steve Jobs/Mark Zuckerberg-like caricature. Showtime's The Man Who Fell To Earth stars Chiwetel Ejiofor and Naomie Harris and picks up the story in the present day. David Bowie's film version of The Man Who Fell To Earth is a cult classic and is the version most audiences are familiar with. Indeed, the film's events are also canon in Showtime's The Man Who Fell To Earth, which is otherwise stylistically very different. By reinterpreting it through a modern lens, Showtime's The Man Who Fell To Earth inadvertently ruins David Bowie's iconic role.

In the new Showtime series, he plays an alien sent to Earth on a mission to find the one woman (Naomie Harris) who can save his species.

At the party after the Oscars, which was Ellen Degeneres‘ party, I turned around at one point and I saw my mother in a very, very deep and involved conversation with John Travolta. At that moment it all flashed. “For an alien, he’s there for assimilating a lot of the different nuances of the human experience,” says Ejiofor. “The human experience has differences for different groups of people. Ejiofor also looks back on his Oscar nomination for playing Solomon Northup in 2013’s Best Picture, “12 Years a Slave.” “There’s one memory that I have that always flashes back to me,” he reveals. I thought it was beautiful and brilliant, but it was strange and kind of wild. In Showtime’s inspired continuation of the novel by Walter Tevis and the iconic film, an alien named Faraday (Ejiofor) crashes deep into the oilfields of New Mexico with a mission: he must find the brilliant scientist Justin Falls (Naomie Harris), the one woman on earth who can help save his species. “I had seen the David Bowie film and I loved it,” says Chiwetel Ejiofor, the star of Showtime’s sci-fi drama “ The Man Who Fell to Earth,” which is based on the 1976 Bowie film.

Forty-six years later and the story of alien, Thomas Jerome Newton (Bill Nighy takes over the David Bowie role) continues as a new Anthean who calls himself ...

I am sure that The Man Who Fell to Earth will gather a fan base and I am happy for the show. Little has changed in the premise from film to series, it is built on the tried-and-true story telling of a stranger in a strange land that must learn how to be more human to survive, usually by befriending a human who teaches him the true heart of humanity. With the help of a fallen scientist, Justin Falls (Naomie Harris), the two must work together to not only save Anthea, but reverse the damage we humans have done to our own planet.

THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH is a new Showtime series (on Paramount+ internationally). An inspired continuation of the 1976 film. Review >

The creators of The Man Who Fell To Earth are Alex Kurtzman and Jenny Lumet. The two have worked on several series in the past. If you like a good sci-fi story, then you should enjoy The Man Who Fell To Earth on Showtime/Paramount+ as well. This new The Man Who Fell To Earth series isn’t just a remake. THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH is a new Showtime series – on Paramount+ internationally. An alien (Chiwetel Ejiofor) crashes deep into the oilfields of New Mexico with a mission: he must find the brilliant scientist Justin Falls (Naomie Harris), the one woman on earth who can help save his species. Read our The Man Who Fell To Earth series review here! As in “Why does this brand new show have such a strangely low IMDb rating?” and then look at the user review and see the word “woke” thrown around. In the title role, we now have the Oscar-nominated actor Chiwetel Ejiofor ( The Old Guard). I don’t always think he’s perfectly cast, but for The Man Who Fell To Earth, he’s absolutely brilliant. It’s beginning to change now that people actually watch it and realize that this is a really good show. This time around, Thomas Newton is played by Bill Nighy (Love Actually, The Limehouse Golem). A rather brilliant choice now that Bowie is no longer among us to reprise the role. I wasn’t all that excited after watching the trailer for this new series because it felt way too messy to me. The title and core plot will be familiar to most sci-fi fans, but this isn’t simply a remake.

In the 2022 sequel, this alien, Faraday (Chiwetel Ejiofor), also has somewhat the same mission and a connection to Thomas Jerome Newton (played by Bill Nigh).

Then he reveals that the “message” he mentioned earlier is a piece of instruction that will direct him toward his next step. She reassures her father that she has money and that it will help them a lot with paying the rent (to Marcus) and his pills. It is clear that Faraday has heightened senses and is probably a bit more powerful than humans, if not a lot. One day, she is thrown out of work, and while she is returning to her car, she receives a call from the police department that tells her that she has someone who wants to meet her. We see visions from his dream of his wife and daughter while Justin speaks to her father on the phone while driving. This is when Faraday starts repeating Justin’s father’s words from the time Justin and her father were speaking on the phone before stopping by the gas station. While on the road, Justin gets scared out of her wits when she sees a cop car following them. She approaches the two with a gun and somehow manages to get rid of them. Justin Falls is a woman who is struggling to make ends meet for herself and her family, which includes her ailing father and her daughter. He empties a bottle of water in one go and then reveals that he is from Anthea, pointing to the skies, and that he is on a 9-hour mission. A police car arrives, and one of the two police officers literally pulls the hose out of his mouth and then takes him into custody. In the film, the alien’s name is Thomas Jerome Newton (David Bowie). Newton, hiding in a human form, seeks help from other humans to bring water to his home planet, Anthea.

Jenny Lumet and Alex Kurtzman's Showtime adaptation of The Man Who Fell to Earth, based on Walter Tevis' 1963 science fiction novel of the same name, begins ...

Now, as culturally, socially, and politically divided as we’ve ever been, seems as good a time as any to address the theme of our own hard-headedness. Ejiofor is inventing Faraday’s quirks, tics, outbursts, physical mannerisms, and mode of speech on the fly, and the feeling of never quite knowing what he’s going to do next adds a very welcome sense of comedic uncertainty to proceedings. He doesn’t understand Earth’s language or customs, so his attempts to explain to Justin why she’s important come out as either gobbledegook or insulting parroting of things he has overheard, which he often doesn’t understand the context of. His home planet, Anthea, is in a state of some disrepair, and he has been sent on a mission by a missing inventor named Thomas Newton (Bill Nighy) which involves saving both his own planet and Earth from the ravages of a ruined climate. Integral to this plan is Justin Falls (Naomie Harris), a disgraced expert in quantum fusion technology that might hold the key to human and Anthean salvation. But that is indeed where Faraday – he takes the name from a disinterested cop’s name tag – comes from.

Candy Clark, who starred opposite David Bowie in "The Man Who Fell to Earth," recalls working with the iconic rocker in the 1976 sci-fi movie directed by ...

“I don’t know how he found my address but it was David Bowie, and there, behind him, was the [blue] limousine from the movie [in which Thomas Newtown was driven around]. “It was the ’70s and that was cutting edge,” she said of their nude scenes. I very much cared, but it was the ’70s and that was kind of mandatory at the time if you wanted an acting job.” Roeg used an all-British crew to shoot the movie — “which was very unusual,” Clark said — and she and Bowie spent two months together during filming. “He was just playing with his myth,” she said. “The Man Who Fell to Earth” began shooting in New Mexico in July 1975.