Joker: 10 1970s Comic Book Movies DC Should Make Next
3. Martian Manhunter As The Man Who Fell To Earth
Featuring David Bowie's finest screen performance, as an off-kilter, incomprehensible alien, Nicolas Roeg's 1976 movie of The Man Who Fell To Earth is, like several examples on this list, a character study in a very 1970s style. In this case, however, it is not so much a dark thriller as a piece of slow, meditative, arthouse filmmaking. What's to say, though, that there is no place for a DC character in such a story?
Bowie's Thomas Newton is a refugee from a dying planet, disguised in human form on a mission to Earth. He becomes distracted, entranced and depressed by our human customs before being the subject of suspicion and imprisonment for his alienness.
Obviously, the trope of the alien refugee who fell to Earth is a pretty classic one for DC Comics. It's basically their foundational text as Superman's back story. When imagining a DC take on The Man Who Fell To Earth, however, another character comes to mind more than the Big Blue Boy Scout.
Always raised as a human, Superman doesn't have that same sense of loss that we see in Newton's flashbacks of his family, nor does he experience the same detached view of human culture. But Martian Manhunter J'onn J'onnz does, accentuated by his human form being, like Newton's, merely a disguise.
A Martian Manhunter Who Fell To Earth movie could also draw heavily on the Kingdom Come version of the character, shattered and drained, trapped in his human form and only partially powered after the destructive effects of attempting to open his mind to the thoughts of the entire human world.