Fire in the Sky (1993)

In 1993, Paramount released a film about six loggers in Snowflake, Arizona who watch a red light descend through the treeline and lose one of their number to it. The man returns five days later, naked and shattered, with a story no sheriff wants to hear. This is a dramatization of Travis Walton's 1978 book, and it plays its cards with a straight face: the polygraph, the search party, the small town turning on its own. Nobody in the frame stops to explain what the audience should feel about loggers, or rural poverty, or the tabloid economy that briefly makes Walton a commodity. The film notices the tabloids and moves on. It has a story to tell and limited interest in moral instruction.

The centerpiece remains the examination chamber, where Industrial Light & Magic earns its fee. A man is stripped, sealed in elastic, and subjected to procedures rendered with clinical patience. Roger Ebert admitted he believed he was seeing something alien, which is the highest compliment available to a film of this vintage. Around that sequence sits a fairly conventional procedural about disbelief and loyalty. Robert Patrick gained weight and grew a beard for the role; the production shot in the Umpqua National Forest and let the trees be trees. No argument is mounted about timber or land. The woods are simply where the light came down.

As a document of social consciousness, the film is barren, and this is not a criticism so much as a measurement. Its cast is white, its women peripheral, its gaze fixed on male friendship and male trauma. Race never surfaces. Neither does sexuality, nor the body as a site of affirmation, nor the mind as a category to be destigmatized. The aliens are not a metaphor for anything current. They are aliens. The result is a curious artifact: sincere, occasionally frightening, and entirely innocent of the preoccupations that would come to define the following decades of American cinema. It asks nothing of us but attention.