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I'm not happy about this: Fire in the Sky is a bad movie. It is really disappointing considering its reputation as one of the scariest alien abduction movies ever made. Yes, it has the single most terrifying alien scene in film history, and I'll luxuriate in the horror of that moment. But that's ninety minutes into Fire in the Sky and after that's over, the movie ends on a thud. The rest of it is a mediocre melodrama in a small town about a mystery that is never much of a mystery. It is a remarkably unambitious movie in many ways, there is very little on its mind about aliens, or the supernatural, or even the small town politics its wasting our time with. Fire in the Sky is just not a horror movie for most of its runtime. It is a very boring movie.
With one really great sequence. Go skip to one hour, twenty three minutes in. Then at an hour thirty-five, you're done. Turn it off.
Fire in the Sky's abduction is so terrifying, and it is in a different movie than everything else. It is night and day between that sequence and the rest of the movie. So let's just go right into it, it rules. The plot involves the disappearance of Travis Walton (D.B. Sweeney), a logger in Arizona who reappears five days later after much controversy that never matters for anything. During his 'Welcome Home' celebration, he starts having severe PTSD, and after some syrup lands on his face, he remembers his experience.
The best thing about Fire in the Sky's vision of SciFi is how filthy it is. The ship is full of dusty surfaces. There's random trash all over the place, weird objects these creatures collected from their victims. Their technology is not sleek, it is more than lived-in, it is unclean. Like a hoarder's house, some environment ruled by creatures with bad hygiene. This cannot have any practical purpose, there is no science happening, just the work of wicked goblins relishing their nastiness. Travis has to put his hands in slime, and gets some nasty brown crap poured down his throat. He awakes in this zero gravity chamber and has to tear through this rubbery film to get out of his cell. Over to the side there's a half-rotten corpse that might still be alive somehow.
The Grays that show up are not the cute little men
of the cover of Whitley Strieber books. The iconic face is just a suit.
Underneath are these wrinkled creatures with beady crossed-eyes and a cruel
expression. They carry Travis onto the operating table to smoother him
in tight latex, crushing him to the table. Very S&M in the most unpleasant ways. It is unrelenting in its painfulness. Travis has weird instruments pushed into his screaming mouth and other things
jammed into his neck. They leave one eye open and pour some milky fluid
right into the open socket. So he can peer through this foggy liquid to see a needle slowly extending to his eyeball.
This is masterful. Bill Pope put all his energy into this, then he went to sleep for the rest of the shoot. Industrial Light & Magic made the effects, and they're great. D.B. Sweeney does a lot of floating in zero gravity and the effect is flawless. Truly bravo.
Now I have very few positive comments left to say.
A cast member on Red Letter Media once muttered cynically during a Best of the Worst review, "you have to put something in the movie!" And beyond all the artistry of movie-making, it does really boil down to that: there have to be images on screen to fill time. Fire in the Sky is not a hideous movie. The camera is moving, a lot of shots have a nice autumnal orange glow to them. But so many scenes... just exist. There's entire subplots that never really add up to anything. Relationships that feel like sketches of characters. It feels unfinished, frankly.
Fire in the Sky is based on the "true story" (in the scariest of scare quotes) of the real Travis Walton, who reportedly was taken by aliens in 1975. I've said before that this field is full of charlatans and bullshit, Walton's Wikipedia page implies heavily that he is full of shit. His friend Mike Rogers (played in this movie by Robert Patrick) admitted in 2021 that the whole thing was a hoax before choosing to recant the recanting. The film's October color pallet might be its attempt to look more Seventies. This is one of those movies that does so little to commit to their settings that you could watch half of it without realizing it is even a period piece. I also suspect that this movie was made by people who did not believe Walton. They love his story for its exploitation value, but also are fundamentally uninterested in his life. The fact the horror does not add up to a real theme has a nasty cynicism to it when you realize this a story told by a liar. Of course it is empty and shallow.
In the movie, Travis and Mike are best friends and future brother-in-laws living a meager a blue collar life. Mike is struggling to pay his mortgage and keep his marriage together, Travis's big ambition is a crayon drawing of a motorcycle dealership he dreams they'll open together. He's a boy whose best friend has had to become a man, it could be a good relationship is this were more sketched and they had more time together. While working in a six-man logging crew, one night they see a UFO up in the trees. The giant red object appears to be a forest fire, until they realize it is a craft with a lava-like texture below it. Travis gets out of the pickup truck and is taken by a beam of light. The other five flee back to town to tell very dubious local cops and a hot shot out-of-town detective, Frank Watters (James Garner) their story.
Most of the plot ends up therefore being Mike and his gang having to fight off a swirling police investigation and the heavy insinuation that they killed Travis. There's lots of details to this that do not matter. One member of the crew Dallis (Craig Sheffer) has a criminal record and likes to hang around a junkyard to sleep with Mexican ladies. There's a dorky scumbag UFOlogist hanging around. Everybody takes a lie detector test which reveals nothing because polygraphs are total pseudoscience. Watters knows they're lying. The crew seem to be leaving out details and hiding something from the police, but we never find out what. They give Robert Patrick a big speech at the town hall demanding they believe him, which is corny and forced, even though Patrick is a very good actor.
There's just big things missing in this script. Travis and Mike, and Mike's wife Katie (Kathleen Wilhoite) might be suffering in a homoerotic love triangle. I'm grasping at straws here, because that at least is about... anything! Versus the nothing we have otherwise. Fire in the Sky is a really dull movie for such long stretches, just a
drama about regular slobs dealing with too much media attention, and it
does not have much to say about the media. Or policing. Or aliens, even. We've seen that aliens can represent so many things: creepy modernity, religious awakenings, sexual terrors. The aliens in Fire in the Sky are basically not in this movie except that flashback, so they cannot represent anything except some spooky freaks doing some fuckery. Even the ending is a shrug. Mike loses his family, Travis gains a family, they hang out one last time, and the movie ends. If there was a final revelation that Mike had also been taken by aliens, that would work better. It at least leaves you with a fear that the aliens might come back.
This is the Nineties. We're about to hit the high water mark of UFO fascination. The X-Files will premiere a few months after this movie comes out, and Robert Patrick will eventually be the star of that show in its last seasons. And that show worked so successfully in the unknowability of the aliens, it had this impressive schizophrenia to it. There was always some conspiracy, Mulder and Scully were always just within reach of cracking it open, and it never would add up to anything concrete. Because there is nothing concrete in this worldview, it's just a deep unease that the universe is broken. But broken in a kind of reassuring way, that it is not random chance and lucky breaks that make the world work, instead a malevolent demiurge in flying saucers ruling from the skies. The X-Files episode of Fire in the Sky would know how to end: with its hero staring at the stars, unsure of what happened but still looking for an answer. Cut to that great piano theme. This movie ends with two dudes hanging out in broad daylight.
Fire in the Sky is such a fundamentally boring object I started talking about a TV show instead. I'm sorry I rewatched this movie because all I remembered was the abduction sequence, and that's the only part you need to remember.
Next time! Invasion of the Student Body Snatchers, The Faculty.
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