Fire In The Sky
January 5th 2007 05:14
Made in 1993 and directed by Robert Lieberman it had a modest impact on its original release, but since went on to enjoy a healthy life on the shelves of video stores around the world, where it has garnered some what of a small cult following. This is not immediately apparent while sitting through the film’s first fifteen to twenty minutes, but soon enough the viewer is hooked into the film’s extra-terrestrial intrigue.
What did happen to poor old Travis Walton up in the White Mountain woods?
Apparently Travis and his five work logger colleagues, while returning from a hard day’s yacker felling trees, saw a deep red glow emanating from a clearing. It looked like a massive unearthly fire.
As any curious bugger would do, they got closer to investigate. It certainly didn’t look like any fire they’d seen before. That’s because it was no fire. It was the glow of an unidentified flying object, a massive spherical UFO hovering over the clearing. And what does clucky young Travis do? He jumps out of the truck and runs underneath the craft, mesmerized by its eerie presence.
Walton’s work mates are too scared to leave the truck and holler vainly to Travis to get his stupid ass back in the ute. Travis finally turns to join them and is promptly trapped in a bright white beam of light which shoots down from the UFO’s undercarriage. His colleagues look on in horror. Travis is thrown back as if electrocuted, and his mates burn rubber.
Here's that dramatic abduction scene from the movie:
Further down the mountain side road, they realize the error of their ways, and his best mate Mike drives back to the clearing to rescue Travis. But Travis is gone. And so has the giant UFO.
What follows is your standard murder investigation by the highly skeptical detective from the CIB played with sardonic nonchalance by the always good James Garner. The rest of the small town all turn against the boys, with even the usually trusting sheriff not really believing their far-fetched story of alien abduction. Relationships become strained as the media dogs start sniffing, yapping and biting.
Although the entire film has a very TV movie look and feel (this helps it to play well on the small screen), it sports all round excellent performances, especially from the actors playing Travis’s loggin’ colleagues, many of whom are recognizable from earlier or later work; Robert Patrick played Arnie’s nemesis in Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Peter Berg went on to co-star in cult noir The Last Seduction and direct pitch-black horror comedy Very Bad Things, Craig Sheffer did several brat-packy flicks, while Henry Thomas had starred in Speilberg’s much more friendlier night skies piece E.T: The Extraterrestrial.
Tracy Torme’s taut screenplay nicely plays off the growing unease amongst the township and the police investigation with the edgy paranoia and distrust which spreads through the five surviving woodsmen, with Dallis (Sheffer) adding dangerous weight to the murder angle.
Five days after Walton had vanished Mike gets a call from a hoarse and terrified Walton. He’s at some gas station close to town. They find him naked, bruised, and petrified.
It is the dramatic intrigue as to what on Earth happened to Travis which spearheads the rest of the film’s narrative. And all is revealed during a stunning 10-minute sequence close to the film’s end. The special effects are not mind-blowing (by today’s standards), but for sheer visceral effect they are superbly done nevertheless.
Fire in the Sky is easily one of the best close encounters of the third kind movies because it tells its story without trying to wrestle with the truth too much and it captures a keen sense of creeping menace. Ultimately deals more with the stress and duress created around this event, culminating in Walton’s alleged waking dream.
The movie delivers the possibility that Travis Walton had some kind of an intensely traumatic experience, and five of his colleagues had an experience of another kind. They all took polygraphs (lie detector test) and all passed.
More likely than not it was all an elaborate hoax with some fine amateur “Hollywooding” from all the loggers involved. Who really knows? Makes for a beguiling movie though, and I’m sure a good pulpy read on your next flight if you can find the paperback somewhere.
But those ten odd minutes of raw alien experience are some of the most unsettling and nightmarish moments I’ve ever witnessed in an alien abduction movie. I’m positive the Wachowski Brothers (The Matrix) were hugely influenced by some of Fire in the Sky’s images.
And even if none of it really happened, it certainly feeds the cosmic flame of interstellar wonder and an eerie and shadowy curiosity.
* the image on this page was taken from the following wikipedia page:
Fire in the Sky
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