With news this week that NASA officials believe that UFO sightings aren’t credible but they do entertain the possibility of extraterrestrial life, it is no better time to review the 1993 sci-fi/horror/mystery Fire in the Sky. It’s a muddled movie that seems like a glorified TV movie that never does really achieve what it should’ve.
The movie is most memorable for a terrifying sequence that occurs in the third act around the 1:23-minute mark in which Travis Walton (D.B. Sweeney) suffers a post-traumatic stress memory of his alleged abduction. I say “alleged” because the incident has been one of speculation and skeptism since it occurred on Nov. 5, 1975 in the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest in Arizona. Walton was part of a seven-man lumberjack crew who were returning home when they reportedly saw a UFO off the side of the road. Walton stepped outside to get a closer look and what happened next has been in question ever since.
H.G. Wells’ published The War of the Worlds in 1898 and even after the radio broadcast adaptation by The Mercury Theater on Halloween Night 1938 that made Orson Welles popular, alien abduction stories didn’t start until many years later. (Also, rumors of people taking the streets thinkng the broadcast was real have been exaggerrated. Most people weren’t even listening to that show) One of the most famous and early cases involved Barney and Betty Hill on Sept. 19-20, 1961 near Lancaster, N.H. This was later dramatized in the second season of American Horror Story. Not even after reports of a suspected alien aircraft crash near Roswell, N.M. in 1947, abductions didn’t get much attention.
No, skeptics have pointed the finger at people with wild imaginations seeing movies like the famous 1953 adaptation of Wells’ novel and the movie Invaders from Mars. There was also the original 1951 The Day the Earth Stood Still. These movies were released during the atomic age of the 1950s and movies about aliens and beings from another planet were all the rage. Even about two weeks prior to Walton’s abduction, NBC ran a TV movie The UFO Incdident, with James Earl Jones on Oct. 20, 1975. So, some people have said the stories are people just using the movies as inspiration for hoaxes for attention.
The same criticism has been directed at people who reported initial sightings of the chupacraba but were later believed to be inspired by the human/alien child hybrid in the 1995 movie Species. Since then, people have changed the shape of what they think is a chupacabra but skeptics and scientists believe what people have seen are wild dogs, coyotes and wolves with severe mange that have left them mostly hairless. Even the famous picture of the Loch Ness Monster was proven to be a hoax as well as people admitting to using boards of wood to make crop circles.
It really all boils down to what you believe and who you believe it from. And that I’m sure is what the filmmakers of this movie were trying to convey. Seven men go to work one morning and six come back home all saying they saw something in the sky that must’ve have hurt their friend/co-worker. Really, are you gong to believe them? Of course, the $64,000 question is if they all say Walton get struck by some beam of light and force that knocked him down, why didn’t one of them rush to his aid? They had chainsaws and I’d bet everyone of them carried some form of a pocketknife so it’s not like they weren’t armed with weaponry.
And that’s the question many people in the community of Snowflake, Ariz. pose. They claim they drove off in terror in the truck of fellow logger Mike Roger (Robert Patrick), but he decided to go quickly back but Walton’s body was gone. The local law enforcment, Sheriff Blake Davis (Noble Willingham) and a state police investigator, Lt. Frank Watters (James Garner), are skeptical as well as others in the town. It’s been reported that Walton didn’t get along too well with a fellow logger Allan Dallis (Craig Sheffer) and they had a heated argument earlier that day.
People suspect that Walton was actually killed and even Watters suspects that Rogers, who is a good friend of Walton’s, is covering it up. Unfortunately, this takes up most of the first half of this movie which seems to drag on the movie. Who really cares about all these towns people spouting their opinions as Watters seems to know he isn’t getting the whole story? I guess it was to show how people can quickly turn on each other when rumors surface in small towns.
Garner does what he can with the role as he always has with every role. It’s really an underdeveloped role and I feel it was beefed up with more scenes when he was cast. At one point, he suspects Walton was killed but after he resurfaces, Watters suspects it was a hoax. And since Watters was only missing for five days and about six hours, was there really a huge manhunt and investigation or has that been exagerrated for the movie?
Patrick manages to show he has some impressive acting talents that go beyond what we saw as the T-1000 in Terminator 2. He conveys the right blue-collar feel of a 1970s man who finds himself at his wits’ end with people who’ve he has known all his life are calling him a killer. This helped him get the role of FBI Agent John Doggett in The X-Files, which should’ve been spun off in a different series. Even Sylvester Stallone praised Patrick’s performance as a corrupt police officer in Copland.
As for Sheffer, he does what he can with a stereotypical role as an Arizona redneck who’s only the way he is for the convenience of the plot. Considering that Sheffer had previously appeared alongside a young Brad Pitt and Tom Skerritt in the wonderful A River Runs Through It directed by Robert Redford, it’s a shame his career has taken such a huge hit over the years appearing in that Hellraiser sequel that wasn’t intended to be a Hellraiser sequel. The rest of the cast seem to be just as one-dimensional. Willingham does his usual good ole boy schtick as the sympathetic sheriff. He was one of those actors who could switch between playing good guys and bad guys and it’s nice to see the sheriff played from a different angle in a movie like this.
Aside from Walton, Rogers and Dallis, the other loggers are fictional. There are six in the movie because you don’t have to pay for another actor when you can just five their few lines to the more prominent characters. Peter Berg plays logger David Whitlock who seems to function as the rational one among the loggers who is often Rogers’ supportive and to keep Dallis from going overboard. Bradley Gregg and Henry Thomas play loggers Bobby Codgill and Grey Hayes, who spend most of the time in the background and say a few lines when questioned by authorities or scream at Walton to get back in the truck. The casting of Thomas seems to have been done as a nod to E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial but it’s wasted casting. Thomas was closer in age in his early 20s as the real-life Walton at this time.
The rest of the cast seem to be right out of Central Casting of blue-collar working families. Kathleen Wilhoitte nags a lot as Rogers’ wife, Katie, but like Teri Garr’s character in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, her only goal is to make her character less sympathetic when they get a divorce which is mentioned in an end title card. Scott McDonald does a lot of sneering as Walton’s brother, Dan, who seems to not believe the story of the UFO until a naked Walton is found near a gas station out on a country road about 30 miles away from Snowflake in the Heber-Overgaard, Arizona area.
And that’s the problem with Walton and Sweeney’s performance. He’s not the main character and is missing from the middle of the movie. Sweeney isn’t given much to do just react. The movie focuses so much mainly on Rogers and the investigation that you’re like Jeff Goldblum in Jurassic Park wondering if they’re going to have aliens in this alien abduction movie. Imagine if James Cameron made Titanic from the point of view of the crew members of the Carpathia which rescued the survivors. Yes, it might have made a fascinating story but people really bought their tickets to see a movie about the Titanic.
As for the actual abduction, it is amazing and it’s a shame more wasn’t shown as Walton wakes up in an embryonic pod in a spaceship interior where there is zero gravity. He then is attacked by three alien bald creatures which one reviewer committed resembling John Gielgud and I can’t unsee it. It’s about 15-20 minutes long and it is terrifying so much you wish director Robert Lieberman and writer Tracy Torme went harder for an R rating. The fact Lieberman, who passed away earlier this year, sandwiched this movie in between the family kids’ movies All I Want for Christmas and D3: The Mighty Ducks shows he has some impressive talents.
Unfortunately, the real Walton has said the abduction sequence is completely false. Walton reported in his book The Walton Experience that he actually flew the ship and the aliens were more cordial. He has spoken out against the movie. Lieberman admitted he based this sequence on a nightmare he had. I can understand the change. If they had kept it the same as Walton had wrote, it would’ve been similar to the 1989 Communion. Lieberman and Torme wanted to do something different.
Reviews of the movie were mixed except for praise for the alien sequence and Patrick’s performance. Reportedly Lieberman was opposed to casting Sweeney who was making headways following crucial roles in the TV miniseries Lonesome Dove and The Cutting Edge. You kinda get the sense Lieberman didn’t like working with him which is why the focus is more on Rogers. But Sherry Lansing, head of Paramount Pictures, at the time wanted Sweeney.
Lansing’s husband, filmmaker William Friedkin, reportedly praised the movie upon seeing an early screening. And Anne Rice, who The Vampire Chronicles books, called it one of the scariest movies she had ever seen. And even today, people still praise the abduction scene even though the movie is mostly forgotten. Part of the movie’s failure is that it was released during the winter-spring months of 1993 when no one was going to the movies as America was still recovering from a recession. I remember seeing CB4 made the No. 1 spot with a puny $6 million over the weekend.
Another problem was it was released on March 12, 1993, the same weekend of the infamous 1993 Storm of the Century or the Blizzard of 1993 and The No-Name Storm as it is also called. It was a late winter storm front that blanketed most of the eastern and even southern states in a massive blizzard and subfreezing temperatures. Many states from Georgia all up to Maine reported huge amounts of snowfall that kept people at home. Even Mobile, Ala. on the Gulf Coast got three inches of snow. Other parts of the lower south reported tornadic activity. When I was living in northwest Georgia at the time, several spring breakers heading down to Florida got stuck along Interstate 75.
It happens. When a large chunk of the movie-going population is worried more about staying warm and digging out from several inches or feet of snow, they don’t have time to spend it at the movie theaters, if any were even opened. Produced on a budget of $15 million, it only made about $20 million domestically. If I remember correctly, it did find some popularity on the home video and the cable markets in the mid 1990s. I’d argue that the scene of Walton waking up in a pod was copied by the Wachowskis in the first Matrix when Neo wakes up after taking the red pill.
If anything else, it might be a cautionary tale to stay in the vehicle next time you see some object in the sky.
What do you think? Please comment.
Zane Says 