Re: for all mankind, another crappy mooee from 1989

On Thu, 14 Dec 2006 23:27:18 GMT, Alan Jones <alanvj@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

You're probably right. I'll try and watch that movie again, when I
have time.

....The movie and the book both need to be read so you can get the main
message that Walter Tevis was trying to get across. What the movie
doesn't reveal at the end is what the record album is all about, and
the irony of Newton's final fate. In the movie, Newton winds up simply
a drunk on a very large pension from all those patents he still owns.
He's trapped in his human disguise - especially the eyes - thanks to
all that government testing, so for all practical purposes he's human
now, and is just drinking his days away.

....In the novel, however, Newton is blinded by the x-rays that also
sealed the contact lenses to his eyeballs. He still has his massive
pension - this time from the government, which takes a PR beating over
their picking on a rich industrialist with nothing found to
incriminate him. While he still winds up drinking himself into a
stupor at the end, we find out that the reason he recorded the record
album was that he also bought a radio station to play the damn thing
and broadcast it into space. It's a farewell message for his family,
and a "*** YOU!" message to his government for having sent him on
this one-way mission. The irony of it all is that, although his world
and his people are dying, as fucked up as Earth is and the direction
it's heading, Anthea - Newton's home planet - will still long outlive
Earth and its stupid little humans and their pending nuclear mass
suicide.

....On the subject of ironies, one thing most critics agree about the
film is that Bowie was quite probably the only person at the time save
for John Philip Law or - and I'm not making this up - Art Garfunkel
who would have been a) skinny enough or b) odd enough to have pulled
off the role of Newton. One critic asked why they didn't just typecast
Leonard Nimoy in the role, but that bozo obviously hadn't read the
book. The sad fact is that the film could have been done without
Nicholas Roeg's surrealism - the "time jumping" bits and the "Hello
Mary Lou!" sex-shooter scenes in the hotel, for example - and with
Bowie in the title role you would have still believed his performance
as an alien with a completely hollow bone structure underneath a
complete human suit.

....IIRC, the film was redone in a more serious tone a few years back,
but I've never seen it on DVD or even for VHS rental. There was a
request made on a binary group about a year ago, but the only version
anyone had was the Bowie version. That nobody has it doesn't surprise
me; after all, if the original was any good, why settle for a shoddy
knockoff? That Sci-Fi C. Thomas Howell "War of the Worlds" TV version
they did in 5 days to cash in on the Cruise debacle is a good example
of why the original is best.

And yeah, I'm talking about the Pal version :-)

OM
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