Is ‘Fire In The Sky’ A One-Scene Wonder?
Pat King
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I was twelve years old when Fire in the Sky was released in 1993. I’d been watching horror movies since I was eight or maybe even a little younger, so I’d already become immune to being scared. Or so I thought. Leaving the theater with my mom, I was shook. The alien abduction scene near the end was one of the most vivid, graphic, and terrifying single pieces of cinema I had ever seen. I rarely had nightmares before that, but I had dreams for weeks that I was being abducted by little gray men. Needless to say, it made an impression. So why was the rest of the movie average, at best?
Based on a supposed true story, Fire in the Sky concerns Travis Walton, a man who claims to have been abducted by aliens on November 5th, 1975. The abduction was witnessed by seven of Travis’s co-workers, loggers in northern Arizona. Travis later wrote a book about his ordeal called The Walton Experience, from which the movie, released to theaters in March 1993, was based.
Fire In The Sky opens with darkness and mist and then a truck full of the most terrified good ol’ boys barrels down a country road that cuts between a forest. What are these big burly fellas so afraid of? Well, they’ve just seen something terrible happen to their friend Travis.
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Later, we flash back to see what happened. Walton (D.B. Sweeney) gets out of a truck packed to the brim with the aforementioned loggers and stares into the sky at an enormous flying saucer that floats impossibly above him. Then suddenly he’s hit with some sort of powerful energy beam and knocked on his ass, either dead or seriously injured. This is what causes our truck full of tough guys to freak the fuck out and skid on down the road.
Despite the promising opening, things start to get silly pretty quick. We know what movie we’ve come to see. There’s no doubt that what we just saw was an alien abduction. But the movie wants you to forget you saw anything for the next hour so that it can weave a weird sort of whodunnit involving a gruff sheriff who’s determined to prove that the boys killed Travis or are at the very least participating in some weird practical joke. And, yeah, that’s actually the more reasonable explanation.
But we know his intuition is wrong. Will they pass a lie detector test? Yes, they do. Sort of. Well, most of them do, but one is inconclusive. Again, no tension there. No matter what happened in the actual true-life story of Travis Walton, in the world of the movie, it’s the indisputable truth that Walton was taken aboard a very creepy space vehicle.
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To be fair, Tracy Tormé, who adapted the movie from Travis’s book, was in an almost impossible situation. In order for there to be any mystery about whether the abduction took place or not, we couldn’t actually see what we saw at the beginning. But if that were the case, there wouldn’t be any science fiction or horror elements at all until the very end, and that would end up making the tone incredibly jarring. We’d suddenly be watching a completely different movie. Now, it’s true that we never actually see Travis taken aboard the ship, but he’s there when the loggers flee, and he’s gone when they get back. So I guess we’re supposed to be left with a seed of doubt? Well, if that’s the case, then it certainly doesn’t work.
And so we’re stuck with watching a mystery play out that’s already been solved for us, which takes nearly all of the tension away. Tormé, an experienced science fiction writer, was clearly uninterested in the parts of Travis’ book that weren’t explicitly horror/science fiction. But Travis only spends a couple of chapters on that. Perhaps an “inspired by” credit instead of directly basing it on the book would have worked better?
There are just so many weird narrative choices in Fire In The Sky. Why have Henry Thomas’ character be a Weekly World News enthusiast? Sure, it gives James Gardner’s sheriff further ammunition for his theory that the guys are telling a yarn, but again, the audience knows what really happened in the world of the movie. There’s no need for red herrings when you’re dealing with Columbo instead of Perry Mason.
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Worse, while Robert Patrick does a phenomenal job as Mike Rogers, Travis Walton’s best friend, as he’s portrayed in the film, the character is just a jerk. For example, you need look no further than the treatment of his wife Kaite (Kathleen Wilhoite). She’s portrayed as a borderline insane shrew who will not under any circumstances believe that Mike witnessed his best friend get captured by little men from space. Would you believe him? Okay, I probably would. After all, I want to believe. But disbelief is probably the correct response in this situation. It’s certainly the logical response. People just don’t get sucked up into space every night, ya know. But, yes, stand by your man and such, even if he is a complete idiot.
And that character’s not an anomaly. Just about everyone we’re set up to dislike in the middle section of the film is actually making reasonable arguments. And under normal circumstances, they would have been exactly right. The sheriff would have been right to suspect shenanigans and the wife would have every reason to tell her husband to come to his senses. Travis’ brother would be right in being pissed off at the loggers as a posse search for Travis’ body out in the woods. But since we know the secret, they’re the crazy ones.
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Well, all told it’s about an hour or so that we have to trundle through before we get to the good stuff. And the good stuff is great, so it’s almost worth the slog. Because the famous scenes aboard the UFO are everything they’ve been hyped up to be. And, actually, the boredom you feel leading up to the scene kind of works in its favor, making it even more powerful in comparison. The ship design, the creatures, the animatronics, the wet biology of the interior all still hold up and even make me pine for a day when movies had to rely on practical effects.
We’re treated to a collection of images dragged straight from the collective unconscious, evoking primal images of being trapped, powerless to the whims of a smarter foe. Travis awakens in a slimy pod with all sorts of revolting gels and bubbling slimes that make it seem like the ship is actually digesting the guy. In fact, for all we know, it might be. When Travis escapes his biological cell and accidentally falls through another guy’s pod, we see that the guy is emaciated, and covered in the slime, most of his lower half apparently eaten away by the stuff.
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After a short exploration of the ship, he’s then forced onto an examination table. Gray aliens with big heads and tiny eyes place a skin-tight wet cheesecloth kind of thing over him. It hugs his body, suffocating him until a gray alien uses a scalpel to open a mouth slit, presumably so that he can breathe. The cheesecloth has him paralyzed. And what the hell is that gizmo? No, they’re not going to stick that in his eye, are they? Indeed, they are about to insert a tiny needle directly into his eyeball.
Now that’s horror cinema! And, listen, don’t get me wrong, every horror movie needs quiet moments so that the more intense stuff stands out. But we also need drama in those quiet moments. Fire in the Sky gives us conflict, but no drama, or at least no psychology. It’s a weird film that way. Place the emphasis on the PTSD and trauma of the men who witnessed their friend potentially get murdered by aliens, and you might have something. But to waste time on a whodunnit when we already know how the dunnit happened is a strange choice indeed.
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What makes a great scene? What gives it that X factor? There’s a sense of perfection to the terror of what takes place aboard the spaceship. The writing plays on some of our most primal fears, the direction elevates the tension, and you can really feel the terrifying biological nature of the ship, which feels on the verge of completely absorbing Travis.
I can think of other movies that have one, or maybe two scenes that are well made while the rest of the film is completely forgettable, but nothing with such a stark difference in quality. I think the closest thing that comes to mind is Roland Emmerich’s The Day After Tomorrow, which features one of his best disaster scenes followed by a plot that is tragically uninteresting.
So is the film worth a watch? Ultimately, I think not. Not the whole thing, anyway. However, I won’t tell anyone if you just look up the alien ship scenes on YouTube. It actually holds up on its own, without any context needed—almost a complete short film. And it might be that the rest of the film kind of weighs the sequence down.
Such a strange legacy for a film to be a one-scene wonder. But it’s a hell of a scene.
Categorized:Editorials
