I thought this was just another B-movie when I started watching it. I knew very little about it other than it had some favorable reviews. I was surprised when James Garner appeared as a detective early in the film. With only a few exceptions, the acting was very good. The score and cinematography were also well done.
This film is about a specific, real-life, UFO hoax that happened in the 1970's, which was widely reported at the time. UFOs are kind of like Santa Claus and professional wrestling -- it's more fun if everybody plays along -- even if everybody knows it's not true. But sometimes folks get carried away, which is what happened in this incident as portrayed in this movie, which involved false police reports and the deployment of scores of people searching for a missing man.
Although the special effects of the flying saucer, inside and out, were well produced, there were a lot inconsistencies in this film that were distracting. The first one I noticed was at the beginning of the film when the pickup truck was driving wildly in the woods. At night time, driving in the middle of nowhere in the outskirts of a small, rural town, the truck turns onto a road and like magic a step van drives up just as the truck makes the turn, narrowly avoiding a collision. That extremely improbable event really pulled me out the film and it was completely unnecessary for the story. Later when the missing man, Travis Walton, is found, he is crouched, naked, soaking wet, up against a building and it is pouring down rain. He motions to his lips and another character says, "Water, water! Somebody get him some water!" (Later it's revealed that he hasn't eaten or drank anything in the last five days.) It's pouring down rain and he couldn't find any water?
Then when he's in the flying saucer, he breaks out of some kind of matrix-ish cocoon and finds that he is in zero-G. He floats around and the aliens eventually get to him and then drag him across the dirt floor of the spacecraft. Yeah, they walk along the floor and *drag* him in zero-G! Meanwhile there are all kinds of things floating around in that zero-G environment as he is being dragged across the floor. (FYI, you can't walk around and *drag* someone across the floor in zero-G, it's impossible. And the dirt would just float away.) Also, dirt floors? In an advanced spacecraft? And the aliens just happen to be able to breath the same atmosphere as humans do? Also, the instruments that the aliens were using looked like they were out of 19th century medicine. However, even with those goofy mistakes, the filmmakers were able to create a somewhat scary scene in the flying saucer.
One issue with the film was that there were no black characters in the film. I briefly saw one black woman extra in the church scene with about a hundred other white folks from town, but she only got a few seconds of screen time and during those moments she was either out of focus or partially obscured. But there were no speaking parts with black people. And generally, there was bias with other races, too. There was one Latino character, a reporter, who was constantly antagonistic towards the protagonists. Otherwise, the only other people of color were extras who were depicted negatively. There were some Latino men whose faces were not shown directly, who were depicted in a "bad guy" setting playing cards along with the most criminal-type character of the film, with a prostitute in the background while a person was speaking Spanish off-camera, swearing. They got 30 seconds of screen time. In another quick scene there were two Japanese men walking with cameras around their necks (a stereotype) and speaking Japanese. They got about seven seconds of screen time.
That's it. A very white cast and people of color depicted negatively. Also, toward the beginning of the film, one of the sheriff's deputies used the ethnic slur, "wetback" when talking to Garner's character, and nobody flinched. They just acted like it was okay to use that slur. That term was commonly used up until about the time of the civil rights movements in the 60s and probably continued to be used in rural areas in the 70s (when the real life UFO incident took place) but this film was released in the early 90s when the term was definitely in the epithet category, and it was not clear in this film that it was set in the 70s, so that slur was definitely inappropriate.
Overall, it was a well-produced movie that was ruined by racially biased casting and racial derision and stereotypes. I would have given it a rating of 8, but because of the racial bias, it gets a rating of 5.
triggers: strobe effects; text at >500 wpm; racially biased composition of the cast; racial derision and stereotypes; graphic torture by the aliens.
rating 5/10; (submitted July 10, 2020, 1:55 a.m. EDT)
This film is about a specific, real-life, UFO hoax that happened in the 1970's, which was widely reported at the time. UFOs are kind of like Santa Claus and professional wrestling -- it's more fun if everybody plays along -- even if everybody knows it's not true. But sometimes folks get carried away, which is what happened in this incident as portrayed in this movie, which involved false police reports and the deployment of scores of people searching for a missing man.
Although the special effects of the flying saucer, inside and out, were well produced, there were a lot inconsistencies in this film that were distracting. The first one I noticed was at the beginning of the film when the pickup truck was driving wildly in the woods. At night time, driving in the middle of nowhere in the outskirts of a small, rural town, the truck turns onto a road and like magic a step van drives up just as the truck makes the turn, narrowly avoiding a collision. That extremely improbable event really pulled me out the film and it was completely unnecessary for the story. Later when the missing man, Travis Walton, is found, he is crouched, naked, soaking wet, up against a building and it is pouring down rain. He motions to his lips and another character says, "Water, water! Somebody get him some water!" (Later it's revealed that he hasn't eaten or drank anything in the last five days.) It's pouring down rain and he couldn't find any water?
Then when he's in the flying saucer, he breaks out of some kind of matrix-ish cocoon and finds that he is in zero-G. He floats around and the aliens eventually get to him and then drag him across the dirt floor of the spacecraft. Yeah, they walk along the floor and *drag* him in zero-G! Meanwhile there are all kinds of things floating around in that zero-G environment as he is being dragged across the floor. (FYI, you can't walk around and *drag* someone across the floor in zero-G, it's impossible. And the dirt would just float away.) Also, dirt floors? In an advanced spacecraft? And the aliens just happen to be able to breath the same atmosphere as humans do? Also, the instruments that the aliens were using looked like they were out of 19th century medicine. However, even with those goofy mistakes, the filmmakers were able to create a somewhat scary scene in the flying saucer.
One issue with the film was that there were no black characters in the film. I briefly saw one black woman extra in the church scene with about a hundred other white folks from town, but she only got a few seconds of screen time and during those moments she was either out of focus or partially obscured. But there were no speaking parts with black people. And generally, there was bias with other races, too. There was one Latino character, a reporter, who was constantly antagonistic towards the protagonists. Otherwise, the only other people of color were extras who were depicted negatively. There were some Latino men whose faces were not shown directly, who were depicted in a "bad guy" setting playing cards along with the most criminal-type character of the film, with a prostitute in the background while a person was speaking Spanish off-camera, swearing. They got 30 seconds of screen time. In another quick scene there were two Japanese men walking with cameras around their necks (a stereotype) and speaking Japanese. They got about seven seconds of screen time.
That's it. A very white cast and people of color depicted negatively. Also, toward the beginning of the film, one of the sheriff's deputies used the ethnic slur, "wetback" when talking to Garner's character, and nobody flinched. They just acted like it was okay to use that slur. That term was commonly used up until about the time of the civil rights movements in the 60s and probably continued to be used in rural areas in the 70s (when the real life UFO incident took place) but this film was released in the early 90s when the term was definitely in the epithet category, and it was not clear in this film that it was set in the 70s, so that slur was definitely inappropriate.
Overall, it was a well-produced movie that was ruined by racially biased casting and racial derision and stereotypes. I would have given it a rating of 8, but because of the racial bias, it gets a rating of 5.
triggers: strobe effects; text at >500 wpm; racially biased composition of the cast; racial derision and stereotypes; graphic torture by the aliens.
rating 5/10; (submitted July 10, 2020, 1:55 a.m. EDT)
