Fire in the Sky

Fire in the Sky doesn't look like it had an expensive budget, but it uses what special effects it has to good effect, and the scenes of Travis on the space ship are genuinely scary. You stop asking, ''But did this really happen?'' -- not a bad question, actually -- and start imagining what it might have been like. [13 Mar 1993, p.C3]

The scenes inside the craft are really very good. They convincingly depict a reality I haven't seen in the movies before, and for once I did believe that I was seeing something truly alien, and not just a set decorator's daydreams. Science-fiction and special effects fans may find these scenes worth the ticket price. But the movie's flaw is that there's not enough detail about the aliens, and the movie ends on an inconclusive and frustrating note. Read full review

Fire in the Sky would seem more a candidate for a TV movie than a theatrical film. [14 Mar 1993, p.4C]

Never scratching below the surface "facts" of the story, this is too thin and unsophisticated to truly compel. Read full review

A concrete slab of science-fiction melodrama that, for all its obvious limitations as a movie, plays on zeitgeist fantasies of an alien visitation as surely as Spielberg’s blissed-out fable did. Read full review

Essentially, this is a film about humans as victims of alien abuse, a mediocre look at helplessness. Read full review

As Walton, D.B. Sweeney recalls Richard Dreyfuss's UFO-obsessed family man in Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind. He's a sweet, semi-looney dreamer who all but invites the aliens to take him, and his performance is the most appealing thing about the picture. [12 Mar 1993, p.3]

Fire in the Sky treats the story with cautious, unimaginative, quite boring politeness. Read full review

Fire in the Sky, a UFO movie, doesn't fly. It claims to be based on an actual case of alien abduction but the movie is as phony as a $3 bill. [13 Mar 1993, p.F4]

Certainly a film which preserved a decent even-handedness on the matter might have been considerably more intriguing. [17 Jun 1993, p.4]

Believe it or not, this fantastic story (of a close encounter of the worst kind) ultimately proves to be pretty uninvolving, relying on the quality of the performances to maintain interest. Read full review

A truly harrowing sequence in the final reel fails to save Fire in the Sky, an otherwise prosaic approach to the gee-whiz genre of UFO aliens snatching a human specimen for examination. Read full review

Fire in the Sky is grim. I'm not sure why director Robert Lieberman chose to fashion his movie like this, but the result is distinctly unpleasant -- dark, gloomy settings with harshly disagreeable characters and no sign of anything remotely resembling comic relief. Read full review

Fire in the Sky, the latest abducted-by-aliens movie, is no Close Encounters. It's hardly any encounter at all. [13 Mar 1993, p.10]

Even if you do believe the story, Fire in the Sky will bore you silly. [17 Mar 1993, p.E2]

Tracy Torme's script is laden with plot holes and humdrum dialogue, and Robert Lieberman's direction does little to cure the deficiencies. [16 Mar 1993]

It sounds like great fodder for sensationalism and special effects, but Fire in the Sky is disappointedly earthbound. Read full review