Like the Walter Tevis novel on which it’s based, Nicolas Roeg’s 1976 film “The Man Who Fell to Earth,” in which an alien, played by David Bowie, travels to this planet to save his dying people, ends in failure. A sequel to that story, premiering Sunday on Showtime, seems determined to bring that story to a happier ending and to suggest, additionally, that all hope is not lost for our own choking orb. Oh, the uses of fiction.
Unlike the film, with its elastic time and changes of tone, the new series is a much more conventional work, a well-made mainstream science-fiction adventure, with a clear line between the good guys and the bad guys, each with a saucerful of secrets, and a character or two liable to fall either way as things progress. That’s not a bad approach; getting arty might just seem imitative, and the noncanonical status of this new chapter allows it not to be too precious about what came before. If it lacks its predecessors’ satirical edge as regards American consumerism and self-sedation, it has other things to say about the way we are, and where we are going. (We are, after all, 60 years on from the novel and nearly 50 from the film.)
Chiwetel Ejiofor plays the new visitor, from the planet Anthea, whom we see first as an erudite, well-spoken, well-dressed famous man of mystery, addressing an adoring crowd, contrasted with scenes of his meteoric arrival on Earth. Described by some as a “a tyrant, a king, a tech god Willy Wonky up to his gobstopper in secrets,” and by himself as “an immigrant, a refugee,” he is about to tell them the story we are about to watch.
