“Thomas Newton” falls like an apple to earth. His diaphanous being has taken the form of David Bowie, androgynous earthling of the orange hair, pale skin, sad eyes. With a business partner, the alien establishes World Enterprises, an empire of images, in order to finance his journey home. The New Yorker's Anthony Lane wrote of the re-release, “Time has done nothing to reduce its cool, confounding strangeness. Here is a sci-fi movie dedicated to the notion that no planet, anywhere else in the galaxy, would look half as freakish as our own would to the inquiring visitor.”