Fighting the Sky is a 2019 sci-fi film about a group of researchers who begin an expedition to track down the point of origin from which strange sounds emerge.
Just because a filmmaker doesn’t have a big budget to make a blockbuster movie, doesn’t mean they don’t have a good story to tell. A lot of indie movies have done great things with very little in terms of financial support. Money should never be the standard for how ‘good’ a movie can be. However, that also doesn’t mean that all low budget movies should be considered good. Many aren’t, the production values sometimes the problem, but mostly everything else. Such is the case for director Conrad Faraj‘s latest science fiction entry Fighting the Sky, a familiar alien movie with big ambitions hampered by unsteady direction, inconsistent acting, and very little energy.
The story centers on Lorraine (Angela Cole), a young woman who has come back home after a year away, a former member of the Unexplained Research Society. She’s just in time, too, as the world is experiencing a strange phenomenon, a series of odd noises in the atmosphere. Is it aliens? Well, there’s also a group of people who have seemingly been returned from abductions, claiming they are from the future. Lorraine and her team of misfits go to work finding out the truth while two teenage sisters Valerie (Jinette Faraj) and Rosie (Judith A. Faraj) take to investigating on their own.
The larger problem with Faraj’s movie, despite the lack of funding, is the film’s wildly uneven tone, which fluctuates from slapstick comedy to straight-up melodrama, often in the same scene. It doesn’t work, mostly because the the actors are rarely convincing or, worse, able to make us take it seriously. Fine, then maybe it’s parody, but a second half that devotes itself to survival abandons that track as well.
At times, it feels like Faraj is purposefully trying to homage the heavy hitters of the genre, including Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Signs, yet populated with a slasher movie cast. But that’s almost giving it too much credit as there’s nothing really all that significant being done with that potential. Sure, Faraj does right by keeping his global story very local, thankfully not trying to over-extend his already small budget into something too big for him to handle, something he could have quite easily got himself trapped by. He certainly tries to make it work.
A late bit of suspense in the final half hour with most of the cast hiding in a house works better than it ought to with a few surprising moments that earn some points for effort and elevate this just a bit, the group of young actors finally finding their stride. There’s also a notable ending that maybe some won’t see coming but for those paying attention will surely see well in advance. Either way, it’s well done but equally frustrating only because it’s proof that there was something really good here that could have been explored better, yet because there’s no explanation for why any of it happens, let alone a mystery that the audience itself could work to interpret, it ends up a curiosity rather than a challenge.