I love good science fiction, and I don't mind slow paced films like Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey," as long as you are given new ideas to think about as you watch, but TMWFTE is both tedious and annoying. The theme of the film, about how an alien of superior intellect gets destroyed by the culture of greed, capitalism and corruption, comes to light very early. What follows adds very little to embellish that idea, and we are stuck watching characters we don't really learn that much about get consumed by the said theme and wallow in the misery of excess.
Roeg, who was a far better director of cinematography than he was a film director, made some interesting films, "Insignificance" and "Bad Timing" among them, but TMWFTE isn't one of them. There are those who praise the film and compare it to "2001," but it doesn't have the clear focus of Kubrick's film, nor a character half as interesting as Hal 9000.
David Bowie is visually interesting, but in essence he's just playing a variation of his rock stage persona. Candy Clark's character was like being immersed in a backwoods opera with redneck hicks, and the actress gives it her all, but the role is so ill-defined, with great leaps of unexplained personality changes that no actress could have pulled it off.
Roeg's style is so convoluted it just becomes a chore to figure out what's going on. And making the main character an alien who comes to earth to get caught up in the whirlpool of contemporary society, doesn't hold up to scrutiny. Why an alien? It could have been someone from a completely different culture or someone with an unusual upbringing (like Peter Sellars in "Being There") and been just as effective, if not more so. The sci-fi element works with Bowie's physicality, but not much else. Other than the alien makeup I found little else visually interesting. The whole production just seemed low budget, with corners cut in all the wrong places. Locations and character motivations for being in these odd locations just come across as arbitrary, as do the plot turns themselves.
I first saw this film on its initial release, a cut version, which, like other Roeg films (namely "Performance") was butchered by the producers before release. I thought this full length restored Criterion edition would have made the film easier to follow, but all it did was make it drag even more.
As others maintain, some respond well to this film, suggesting it has much to say about how people get swallowed up by our capitalistic notions, and the film's prescience of future inventions such as the digital camera, and an mp3 type music device being ahead of their time, and those things are there. Yet, as a dramatic story that pulls the viewer in and gets them caught up in unusual characters lives, I found it to be a failure. To me it was an unfortunately shallow, tedious take on an interesting and worthwhile theme.
Roeg, who was a far better director of cinematography than he was a film director, made some interesting films, "Insignificance" and "Bad Timing" among them, but TMWFTE isn't one of them. There are those who praise the film and compare it to "2001," but it doesn't have the clear focus of Kubrick's film, nor a character half as interesting as Hal 9000.
David Bowie is visually interesting, but in essence he's just playing a variation of his rock stage persona. Candy Clark's character was like being immersed in a backwoods opera with redneck hicks, and the actress gives it her all, but the role is so ill-defined, with great leaps of unexplained personality changes that no actress could have pulled it off.
Roeg's style is so convoluted it just becomes a chore to figure out what's going on. And making the main character an alien who comes to earth to get caught up in the whirlpool of contemporary society, doesn't hold up to scrutiny. Why an alien? It could have been someone from a completely different culture or someone with an unusual upbringing (like Peter Sellars in "Being There") and been just as effective, if not more so. The sci-fi element works with Bowie's physicality, but not much else. Other than the alien makeup I found little else visually interesting. The whole production just seemed low budget, with corners cut in all the wrong places. Locations and character motivations for being in these odd locations just come across as arbitrary, as do the plot turns themselves.
I first saw this film on its initial release, a cut version, which, like other Roeg films (namely "Performance") was butchered by the producers before release. I thought this full length restored Criterion edition would have made the film easier to follow, but all it did was make it drag even more.
As others maintain, some respond well to this film, suggesting it has much to say about how people get swallowed up by our capitalistic notions, and the film's prescience of future inventions such as the digital camera, and an mp3 type music device being ahead of their time, and those things are there. Yet, as a dramatic story that pulls the viewer in and gets them caught up in unusual characters lives, I found it to be a failure. To me it was an unfortunately shallow, tedious take on an interesting and worthwhile theme.