Sequels and Remakes and Adaptations, Oh My!
Review of The Man Who Fell to Earth (Showtime)
Can we take a moment to talk about Jenny Lumet? She’s the second daughter of legendary film director Sydney Lumet (12 Angry Men, The Fugitive Kind, Fail Safe, Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon) and the wife of actor Bobby Canavale. Prior to this year the most notable thing I’d have said she was responsible for was the screenplay for the excellent Jonathan Demme-directed indie feature, Rachel Getting Married, but in 2022 she has co-created and executive-produced two really great seasons of science fiction TV: Star Trek: Strange New Worlds (Paramount+) and The Man Who Fell to Earth (Showtime). Lumet’s partner on these two shows was Alex Kurtzman, who is best known as one of the key creative people involved in Star Trek since the 2009 reboot. Strange New Worlds is flat out the best Trek we’ve gotten in decades and since finishing the first season of The Man Who Fell to Earth last night, I’m beginning to think that Jenny Lumet might be the new ingredient in the mix that’s breathing life into Trek.
I was never a particular fan of the 1976 Nicholas Roeg film version of the Walter Tevis novel, The Man Who Fell to Earth. It was eerie sci-fi starring David Bowie, so growing up, it certainly made the rounds amongst my cohort of gen-x friends, but it always seemed to be too cerebral or too artsy (too dull, if I’m honest) for my tastes. It was also guilty of what my young aspiring film-critic brain found to be one of the worst offenses a movie could commit — it had no ending to speak of, it just sort of stopped. I don’t mean it had an ambiguous ending, like Inception, or an inscrutable one, like 2001: a space odyssey, I mean the movie just sort of peters out, as if they ran out of money one day and simply turned the camera off.
Consequently I’ve never read the novel by Walter Tevis, but he’s the author who wrote the book that The Queen’s Gambit was based on and he’s also the author of a particularly formative SF short story I was fond of in my youth called “The Ifth of Oofth” (you can read it here, it’s quick and pretty fun). Now that I’ve completed season one of the new Showtime sequel to the novel (and film — I’ll discuss that in a bit), I may just have to give the book a chance.
This new show is a sequel to the original story — it takes place 40-some years after the events depicted in the David Bowie movie — and yet, it functions as a sort-of remake as well, in that the basic plot of the show is the same as the original story: a super intelligent alien descends to Earth in order to find resources to save his own, dying world, and in the process goes from a fish-out-of-water who finds humans confusing and difficult, to a rich, corporation-owning inventor who has been infected by humanity in both good ways and bad. Also, the CIA is after him. The show, like the film and novel it’s based on, serves as an environmental parable, but it also throws racism and runaway capitalism into the allegorical mix.
The simultaneous sequel/remake is a rare kind of media. I can’t think of too many other examples. The most famous is probably Star Wars The Force Awakens, which was chapter seven in the series but was also an obvious retread of the events in chapter one. The other one I can think of right now is the 2011 film, The Thing, which is an even rarer bird as it’s both a remake and a direct prequel to the 1982 John Carpenter classic.
Some of the exposition in TMWFTE that references the original story comes from the novel (the alien protagonist lands in Kentucky in the book, but New Mexico in the 1976 film), but some of it is from the movie (the woman Newton hooks up with on Earth is named Betty Jo in the novel, but the new show uses her name from the movie, Mary Lou). There are tons of Bowie Easter eggs — each episode is named after a Bowie song and Bowie lyrics show up in the dialogue a little too frequently. The Bowie character himself is played by British national treasure, Bill Nighy.
Speaking of the cast, it’s pretty great. I’ve enjoyed Chewetel Ejiofor’s acting for many years and in the second or third episode of TMWFTE I told my wife I think this is my favorite performance of his so far. His characters tend to be very controlled and articulate… cold. In this, he’s a raw, open nerve-ending, vacillating wildly from anguish to ecstasy and back, at least until he figures out how humans work and reins in his alien schtick a bit. It’s a fun performance to watch.
Unlike the Roeg film, the characters here are people we both like and care about. The relationships are strong and believable. The stakes are the same as in the Roeg film (or I guess technically doubled, since this one is about saving both Earth and Anthea), but they feel more dire here because the characters are so much more real.
TMWFTE surprised me. It won me over much faster than I’d expected and reminded me that Showtime is still actively making outstanding prestige TV (as if Yellowjackets weren’t proof enough of that). Keep your eye on that Jenny Lumet. I think she’s playing for keeps.
