10 Great Sci-Fi Movies Where The Aliens Walk Among Us

10. The Man Who Fell To Earth

With his timeless androgynous appearance, David Bowie is perfectly cast as Thomas Jerome Newton, the extraterrestrial who crash lands on Earth while desperately looking for water for his drought-ridden home planet. With his advanced understanding of technology it doesn't take long before he amasses a huge fortune as the head of the World Enterprises Corporation, and sets about constructing a new ship to take water back to his planet. In the hands of one of the great visionary directors of the 1970s, Nicholas Roeg, The Man Who Fell to Earth is something of a surrealist puzzle box of a movie. Roeg plays with time and memory, cutting away to scenes of Newton's family slowly dying on his home planet along with hints that he exists in multiple time frames here on Earth (given that time as we know it is a human construct this makes sense - for an alien race, time may well be little more than an illusion). As visually arresting as it is thematically ambiguous, The Man Who Fell to Earth is the kind of ambitious science fiction movie rarely seen today, as much a profound commentary on modern values and culture as it is an experiment in narrative structure. The fact that Bowie was heavily into cocaine at the time only adds to the fragility of his character Newton, who gradually falls to pieces as his mission becomes increasingly unattainable.