*SPOILER ALERT*
(1994. dir: Robert Lieberman) I love this movie. If you clip off the "Hollywood Ending" denouement in which all the loose ends are neatly tied up, just that last five minutes, get rid of that, then you have a True Fortean experience.
The parameters of the "True Fortean" (or daimonic) experience are that you are, first off, fairly certain that something weird and probably supernatural happened, but you can't ever entirely suss out just how much of the story you're told (or, if you were one of the participants, how much of what you experienced) is truth, half-truth, faulty memory, outright lie, or hallucination, and if it's hallucination, how much of it is shared. In our practical, commonplace life we come to the table with a few expectations, certain demands: one is that the Truth is Out There, that truth is distinct from untruth, that there is always a way to snuffle out what really happened, and if you're not finding it, then somebody's obscuring the way or you're not trying hard enough. In a True Fortean experience, the lines between fact and fiction, real memory and hallucination, nature and supernature, get so blurred that they run together into a wholly new artwork, a sort of subconscious watercolor. All our demands are not only unmet but in so strange a manner that it leaves us speechless, and possibly sleepless, the ground having been pulled from beneath our collective quietude.
The movie was based on a "true" tale from the Fortean vault, the Travis Walton alien abduction. (You can read about it in The Walton Experience by Travis Walton.) In the mid-70s, outside a quiet little Mormon burg in the forested part of Arizona (Snowflake, up near Flagstaff), a man vanishes and five days later reappears, naked, near-feral, and damaged, in a nearby town. The best part about this movie is that you're never exactly certain what kind of story you're watching: is it, in fact, an alien abduction? is it, as the investigating officer believes, a crime with a crazy cover-up story? or a publicity stunt dreamed up and executed by a childlike fantasist? Every time you think you've got your finger on the answer, the story shifts, in some tiny way, so that you doubt again.
I love the way this movie starts. You see a road through a forest at night, and the credits roll over the top of it, with sounds of the occasional owl or night creature finishing a picture of utter peace. Then a pickup truck comes slamming over the hill, its driver in an obvious panic, running into trees, careening off the road. Eventually, barely, its engine smoking, the truck parks in front of a honkytonk and five men, big men, loggers, shaken and in a state of shock, file into the warmth of the place and sit down as their friends and kinfolk watch them, their friendly advances rebuffed. The men talk quietly among themselves, establishing they are going to "stick to the story." Then one of them, the leader, walks into the back, picks up a phone, looks at it as if it is an alien device, and dials a number. Later we learn he is calling the cops to report a missing person.
The story unfolds partly through their telling, but mostly we glean it as the investigating officer (James Garner) does. In his first scene, in which he gets the initial call on his police radio as he's driving, the director gives us a strange moment: we are looking at him through his windshield and we see a string of red lights reflected in the glass lift up and we watch his face as he watches it, the radio in his hand momentarily forgotten. It's a trick: our brains convince us it is a UFO, but when the camera pulls back, we see it is the glowing crossbar at a railroad track lifting. It's a trick, yes, but it's also a clue: hallucinations are more frequent than we think they are, and some are trickier than others.
The first half of the movie, we (along with the federal investigator) think we're watching a crime unfold, and then our expectations get cheated once again. Every time we think we have ahold on what is true, it slips away, and the movie keeps that going, without cheating, nearly until the end, which is the only real cheat. In Lieberman's defense, it would have been a bold filmmaker who could leave the "neat ends tied" version off (like the Coen Brothers, with that amazing Tommy Lee Jones dream-speech at the end of No Country for Old Men, or Kelly Reichardt with the controversial and stunning ending of Meek's Cutoff). It weakens the movie into a mere curiosity; on the upside, Robert Patrick is doing a sort of sexy Norman Reedus kind of thing, so it's not all bad.
This could qualify as a horror film, because once you get to the Climactic Reveal of the abduction sequence, it really is horrifying. The aliens look fantastic, seriously fantastic, the best I've ever seen, and the set-up of the "zoo" of abductees I swear gave the Matrix its vast-human-incubator blueprint. After that, it's one big nightmare, a hideosity constructed from goo, a disconcerting lack of gravity, cringe-worthy needles, and gunk and machinery inserted into orifices. And it's filmed in a way to encourage an unsettling, dream-like experience.
After you watch it, you can decide yourself whether you want to go online and join the debate about whether the "true" story is indeed a fabrication. None of that has any bearing on the film itself.
Once again, for emphasis: I love this movie.
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